


Of Queens and Other Q-Words

by pprfaith, reena_jenkins



Category: Wynonna Earp (TV)
Genre: Also does this qualify as road trip AU?, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Blood Magic, Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Character Death, Developing Relationship, Dragons, Established Relationship, Everyone's Potty Mouth, Exiled Princesses, F/F, F/M, High Fantasy, Magic, Multi, Not A Quest, Podfic, Podfic Collaboration, Polyamory Negotiations, REENA MADE ME DO IT, Sisters, This is only 5k longer than I wanted it to be I am so proud, Ward Earp's A+ Parenting, because there are no cars, but it sort of fits, hints of PTSD, sibling relationships, these tags are a mess
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-10
Updated: 2018-09-10
Packaged: 2019-06-22 01:15:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 24,077
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15570537
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pprfaith/pseuds/pprfaith, https://archiveofourown.org/users/reena_jenkins/pseuds/reena_jenkins
Summary: In which Wynonna is a queen banished from her kingdom, Waverly does magic, Nicole has a sword and everyone else is pretty much themselves. Featuring crows, evil witches, family drama and more snark than you can shake a witch at.





	Of Queens and Other Q-Words

**Author's Note:**

> Reena made some really neat tags, then I fucked it up. Sorry. 
> 
> Apart from that, thank you, Reena, dear, for making me do this again, and for being patient with my whiny ass. 
> 
> Enjoy!

 

**Coverartist:** reena_jenkins

 **Music:** [Outlaws](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ScnT6UI3pY), as performed by Delta Rae

 **Length:** 03:15:09

[ **MOBILE STREAMING LINK | 134.7 MB** ](http://reena.parakaproductions.com/podfics/\(WE\)%20_Of%20Queens%20and%20Other%20Q-Words_.mp3)

[ **DOWNLOAD MP3 (RIGHT-CLICK, SAVE-AS)** ](http://reena.parakaproductions.com/podfics/\(WE\)%20_Of%20Queens%20and%20Other%20Q-Words_.mp3)

 

**Part One**

+

“Oh, come on, Wynonna, you have to!”

Wynonna, stomping hurriedly down the hill, waves a hand over one shoulder, shouting backwards, “No, I don’t!”

Behind her, her sister hitches her skirts up higher and gains speed. “Oh, come on! I came home just for today! Do you know how hard I had to pout, beg and whine for Mistress Tan-ar to let me go? You know she doesn’t like me!”

Ignoring the twinge of guilt, Wynonna all but runs the last few feet toward the small creek running at the bottom of the valley. If she can get there, she can leap it and her annoying little sister won’t be able to follow because of her stupid, ostentatious sorceress’ robes are shit for movement. Ha!

“Not my problem!” she hollers while scanning ahead for decent footing. Ten more seconds and she’s home free.

Unfortunately, her idiotic baby sister decides that the obvious solution is to go even faster and in her stupid witchy slippers she loses her footing and Wynonna has to leap sideways to keep her from going ass over teakettle into the water. She grabs Waverly by the waist, yanks sideways and rolls them both. Rocks dig into her back and she ends up flat in the muck, feet in the water, the other girl on top of her.

It’s cold and sticky and she hates everything.

“Damn you, baby girl,” she mutters, weakly, giving up and dropping her head. Might as well. The mud feels about as comfortable against her hair as it does the rest of her body.

Waverly, still panting, tries to scramble to her feet, slides on the wet ground and lands on her front right next to her sister. The sucking sound of her landing combined with her squeal elicits a chuckle from the older Earp.

For a moment, the just lie there, breathing hard. Then Wynonna feels the urge to point out, “This wouldn’t have happened if you would have just agreed to ignore my stupid birthday.”

“It’s not stupid,” Waves argues back instantly, trying unsuccessfully to find a clean spot on her robes to wipe her face with. “Mistress Tan-ar is going to murder me. This is real Attorian silk.

“It makes your ass look flat.”

“I hate you. Look, I know you don’t like your birthday all that much, but you’re twenty-seven today. It’s special. And I want to celebrate with you. Just a little. Is that so bad?”  
Turning her head (mud in her ear, yay), Wynonna studiously looks away from her sister. Uphill, she can see Dolls and Nicole sitting on a log behind the house, watching them. Voyeurs, both of them.

“But it’s not,” she counters, quietly. She’s not even had breakfast and she’s already over this day. “It’s only special because Willa is dead and that’s kind of overshadowed by the fact that I’m banished. Outside the borders of the realm, my birthday means horse dung and you know it. So I’m not really in the mood, okay?”

That earns her an unexpected, muddy and very pointy fist in the shoulder.

“Ouch!”

“I’m not stupid! I know all that. But that’s not all it means! I also means that I only lost one sister that day and not two. It means that you managed to survive another year of your stupidly dangerous job. It means I’m not alone in the world! And that _is_ special. So you are going to go up there, and eat the cake I brought and smile and let yourself be hugged and bear it all because there are people who love you and who are glad that you’re here. Got it?!”

She pauses, then adds, “After we bathe. How did we play here as children? This is disgusting.”

Wynonna snorts. “Well, we weren’t wearing Attorian silk then, that’s for sure.”

With that, she rolls to her feet on a sigh and extends her hand to help her little sister up. And then, because the damage is already done anyway, she topples them both into the water.

+

An hour later, two exiled princesses are sitting at a roughly hewn wooden table in the cabin they grew up in, their hair drying in tangles, wearing sleep clothes for lack of anything else to put on, eating birthday cake.

Across from them, a Southling and a dragon are watching, chin in hands, not even bothering to try and hide their grins.

Wynonna points her fork at both of them. “You’re mean and I hate you.”

Dolls rolls his eyes, the rest of his dark, mobile face joining in the movement. “Yes. We’re so evil, wanting you to be happy and eat cake.”

“Positively villainous,” Nicole chips in, throwing her red hair over one shoulder, playing up the southern accent she usually suppresses unless she’s flirting on the job. Or flirting with Wynonna’s little sister, but they don’t talk about that. Promptly, Waverly starts blushing.

Dolls apparently decides to throw the two a bone. “So, Apprentice Waverly, how long are you planning on staying?”

She shrugs. “I don’t know. I wrangled a week and do not ask me what I had to do for that! But I figured you guys would probably set out on some new job before that? Drop me off at the Citadel on the way?”

The three mercenaries grimace at each other. Their last job had involved a besieged village, a disgruntled demigoddess and way too many arrows. So many arrows. All the arrows. And even their resident shapeshifter can’t shrug off divine arrows easily. (They sting, according to him.)

“We actually thought we’d lay low for a while. We’re good on funds and the last job was a son of a whore.”

“Really?” Waverly’s eyes go comically large with excitement. “That’s awesome! We can spend the whole week together!”

Charmed despite herself, Wynonna chuckles. “Yeah, kid. Might even be enough to get the gunk out of your fancy clothes.”

Waverly just keeps beaming. “I know you’re trying to be mean, but I’m so happy I don’t even care!”

The thing is, she actually means that. Helplessly, Wynonna hauls her baby sister in for a tight, long hug.

One week of peace, quiet and family time. What could possibly go wrong?

+

Afterwards, Wynonna is never sure what wakes her up. Maybe it’s a lifetime of experience in things trying to kill her. Maybe it’s the creaky floorboard by the door that Uncle Curtis intentionally always left loose.

Maybe it’s just the culmination of that low buzz of dread that’s been brewing in her belly all day. After all, an Earp’s twenty-seventh birthday is never not a disaster.

But whatever it is that wakes her, it does so just in time for her to catch the knife on the downward swing, deflecting it with her forearm. The cut burns sharply and she gives a shout, half pain, half a reflex to wake the others, even as she kicks out toward the shadowy figure looming over her.

They stumble backward and she launches herself off the bed, grabbing for the dagger under her pillow as she goes, landing on top of the assassin and promptly getting backhanded in the face.

She rolls, swipes blindly with her blade to keep them off as she regains her footing. Hand slippery with her own blood, barefoot and disoriented. And her hair is everywhere.

They attack again and she shouts as she moves out of range and then right into it, driving the dagger into a soft belly and upwards. Glances off of hard-boiled leather and has to withdraw to avoid being skewered herself.

Behind her, she can hear more fighting sounds, Dolls’ snarl as he lashes out with claws and fangs. Upstairs, in the loft, Nicole gives a shout while Waverly starts chanting, high and panicked.

The attacker comes again but this time Wynonna is upright and ready, uses their own momentum against them, slides past and behind and buries her dagger right in the bastard’s armpit, twisting hard.

She steps back, blood all over both hands now, hers and theirs, mingled, and grimaces as she watches to make sure they’re dead. She steps around, tries to find a face, encounters only a hood and dark cloth, face obscured by a spell of some sort. That does not bode well.

She crouches to rip off the mask only to find her hand clamped in a vice-like grip and the attacker yanking, not dead but moving fast, like they’re not even hurt when she _knows_ she hit the heart. She screams, swipes her knife blindly in the direction of their face.

They duck into her guard, too close, hand on her neck and she can smell rancid breath and rot even through the cloth mask, gags on it as two strong hands find her neck and start squeezing. Her vision flickers. She goes limp.

Upstairs, Waverly shouts something. Light erupts throughout the cabin.

Wynonna feels the assassin shift on top of her, leaning close, close, closer and when they’ve let down their guard, when they’re close enough to kiss, she rears up, driving her dagger straight into the spinal column from the back and yanking, cutting, sawing, until the head is attached by little more than tendons and skin.

She’s drenched in blood, but the damn thing isn’t moving anymore.

In fact, it starts glowing like embers from the inside out and she has to scramble backwards to avoid being burned. A moment later, there is nothing left but ashes.

She stares, gasps, blinks.

She hears Dolls roar and shouts, “Take off their heads! Take their heads, they’re fucking constructs!”

Then, after a single breath to recover, she rolls to her feet, grabs for her sword and rounds the bed to where Dolls is fending off three at once, all of them wrapped in black, faceless. All of them magical constructs.

She beheads one from behind, giving him the opening he needs to rip the second one’s head off. Then she skewers the last one to hold it in place until he can rip it apart. Dust and embers swirl around their bare feet as they both spin toward the stairs and run.

Waverly is pressed into a corner, on her knees, panting hard and shaking with magical exhaustion, dressed in nothing but a nightgown. Sorceresses are only as strong as their preparations and surprise combat is never their strong suit. It’s why they have protectors. Nicole is naked except for the sword in her hand, standing in front of Wynonna’s little sister, panting hard as she watches a swirl of dust settle.

All of them hold very still, listening. Waiting.

When nothing more comes after a minute, Wynonna winces at the sudden sting of the cut on her arm and cocks her head to one side. “Damn, Nics, is that a tattoo?”

Nicole just rolls her eyes, not reacting. They live together on the road most of time. They’ve seen each other naked plenty of times and Wynonna always drops the same line.

“You’re one to talk,” she counters, lowering her weapon. Wynonna is wearing a shift she hasn’t really fit into since she was thirteen. Dolls, on the other hand, is just as naked as Nicole. He shrugs, unrepentant, when Waverly, thoroughly uncomfortable with the casual nudity and violence, makes a little _eep_ sound.

Then she remembers the violence and jumps to her feet. “Oh my goddess, is anyone hurt? Who were those guys? Who sent them?”

She’s already scrambling for the belt of potions and other useful things she keeps close when Nicole grabs for her discarded clothing. “I’ll check the perimeter,” she announces.

Dolls nods. “I’m coming.”

“Put on some pants,” Wynonna reminds as he brushes past her, his hand trailing along her back, a kiss bussing along her temple. Reassurance.

Nicole squeezes Waverly’s hand with the same purpose on her way out.

“Now. Where is all that blood coming from?”

Wynonna shrugs. “Most of it isn’t mine. Eugh. Why do magical constructs have to have blood?”

“Because they’re made with blood magic,” Waverly promptly answers, grabbing her sister and moving her around until she finds the cut.

She shoves Wynonna onto the bed and starts cleaning, poking and bandaging.

Once that’s done, Wynonna stands to join the others outside, only for her little sister to grab her hand. “Who sent them?”

Wynonna grinds her teeth, lip curling. “Just going by the date I’m sure you can already guess, but,” she bends, grabs for something half rolled under the bed and pulls it out. It’s a dagger, the twin of the one the construct downstairs wielded.

On its hilt is a coat of arms, a sword stabbed into a mound. In color, the mound is yellow, to symbolize sand, and there is a well to one side and a flame to the other. It’s the royal coat of arms of the Earp line.

She extends it to let Waverly see and, unnecessarily explains, “It’s Bobo. He’s finally made his move.”

+

Dawn finds them around the fire pit in front of the cabin, none of them eager to go back inside where everything smells of magic and ashes. It gives Dolls sneezing fits. Wynonna would laugh, if a man she once called uncle hadn’t just sent magical assassins to kill her and her last living relative.

“What is he going to do now?” Nicole asks, huddling to her lover for warmth, looking to Wynonna for answers. Waverly was only six when they fled with Uncle Curtis and Aunt Gus. She barely remembers Uncle Bobo. Robert Svane. He only ever let the princesses call him Bobo.

Until he killed his sworn brother and murdered Willa.

Wynonna hugs herself, pretends not to melt into Dolls when he slings an arm around her waist, pulls her close. Her hand finds his on her waist, squeezes. “He’s going to keep trying until we’re dead.”

Waverly stares, eyes wide, jaw working, into the distance. “Then we have to kill him first,” she announces, a thread of steel in her voice that makes Wynonna close her eyes with grief. Waves loved Bobo, once. Loved him and adored him and followed him everywhere. And he always indulged her, setting her on his shoulder more often than not, and listening to her chatter away.

And now here they are.

“There is no we. You’re going back to the Citadel. You’re safe there.”

That earns her a fierce glare. “And what good is being safe when everyone I love is out here, getting killed? I’m coming with you and if you try to stop me, I’ll just follow on my own and probably get slaughtered.”

Nicole clutches her close on reflex and Wynonna growls, low and angry and frustrated and really fucking proud.

Still, “It doesn’t really matter. In case you’ve forgotten, Waverly and I are banished. We can’t set foot onto our own land without excruciating pain and, you know, death. So all of this is moot. We can’t kill him as long as he’s hiding at the center of the … realm.”

Her mouth means to say ‘homestead’ even now, out of habit. Homesteads, that’s what they called the realm. Kingdom. Land. Because it was their home, all of it, down to the last cow pasture, their mother said. The homestead.

It’s not anymore.

Dolls squeezes her hand and she just knows he’s about to offer going alone, when Waverly makes a thoughtful little hum. “I uhm… I think I might know how to break the banishment? I mean, I’ve been doing some research at the Citadel, in my free time, and there’s really only one sorceress powerful enough to cast that kind of spell over such a large territory and if we can get to her, we can make her undo it. Caster can undo any spell based on will alone.”

Wynonna opens her mouth to scold her sister for looking into things she told her to lay to rest years ago, but –

But. “Who?”

“She’s called the Witch of the Stone. According to some of the older records I found, she lives on the rock that ‘howls a fountain of ghosts’.”

Nicole scrunches up her nose. “Is that… the source of the Ghost River?”

Waverly gapes at her. “What? You really think so? I’ve been trying to figure that one out for months!”

“There’s a myth,” Nicole explains, rubbing her arm soothingly. “About how the ghosts are put in the river at the source. There is a rock that wails at night, apparently, and it’s a door to the underworld? All souls that escape it are drawn into the river or something. My nanna used to tell us the story to frighten us away from the river. As if it’s not just called that for the fog.” She shrugs a little, what can you do.

“You grew up that far south?” Dolls asks.

“A good week from the source, actually. But close enough to the river for the story to stick, I guess. So, do you think it fits?”

Waverly nods eagerly.

“Fantastic,” Wynonna drawls. “Then let’s go find the Witch of the Stone at the source of the Ghost River. That sounds like a quest. I fucking hate quests.”

Dolls, the bastard, just laughs.

+

“You know,” Waverly announces, watching the three people she considers family nimbly work their way down a sheer rock wall toward a semi-shallow part of the Ghost River. (“The nearest crossing in half a day in the wrong direction, Waves, move it!”) “I think I don’t like this whole quest thing very much.”

“Not a damn quest!” Wynonna snaps as she drops the last few spans, landing safely on the narrow, sandy bank, water already lapping at her boots. Waverly risks a look down at her own feet, covered in comfortable, warm leather. Perfect for wandering around a drafty old citadel for days on end. Not so much for questing. Ditto on the robes. She got most of the mud, out, too, and it only took seven separate spells and a potion.

“Then I don’t like the very random walk we are taking to find an evil sorceress and reclaim our birthright,” she hollers back down.

Her sister gives an annoyed huff, a puff of air from her nostrils, hands jammed onto her bony hips, glaring. “Screw you! Now get your pampered ass down here!”

“And how am I supposed to do that? I’m wearing _robes_!”

“Not my fault! You’re the one who decided to wear them.”

Because she’s a sorceress apprentice from the Citadel and the robes mark her as such. And also, they’re already stained from their little mud bath anyway. Still. Comfortable travel clothes they are not. Waverly wistfully remembers a time when she wore breeches every day, scaled trees and did whatever she and Wynonna wanted to do.

Before magic and robes and status and, “Representation, my dears, you are no longer part of the _rabble_.”

“I promise not to peek,” Dolls calls up, and it would be cheeky, except the man says everything with a face as expressive as rock, so Waverly is never sure if he’s really joking or not. Her sister just assumes he’s always joking and laughs at even his most dire predictions of death.

“And I promise to absolutely peek!” Nicole adds, winking exaggeratedly. Waverly feels herself blush to her roots.

Oh, damn it all to the goddess and back. She turns around, bends low at the edge and reaches out with one foot, trying to find a hold. She finds about a hand span of rock, broad enough to set her foot sideways and tests it, then lowers herself onto it, holding onto a few bushels of grass for dear life. Her robes billow in the breeze from the water and watch on every little pebble, tangle around her legs and make her regret everything.

But she’s an Earp, so she sets her jaw and mules through, one foot after the other and damn her cramping fingers and toes. Eventually she decides to hell with it and, with her feet at about head level with the others, calls back, “Caution! Dropping sorceress!”

The spell she casts on her boots with a quick chant is one of the first she learned. Levitation. She can’t hold up something as heavy as a human body for long, yet, but lowering herself to the ground is –

Apparently harder than it looks. She loses her balance as her boots jerk and lands, fairly softly, but still with her butt in the water. The splash hits her square in the face and Wynonna and Dolls don’t even try to hide their laughter. Nicole at least turns away first.

“Definitely don’t like this quest!” she announces, wiping icy river water from her cleavage and trying to regain her footing while wearing sodden robes that stick to her every movement. The robes are going at the first opportunity.

Even as she reaches down to help her, Wynonna repeats, “Not a quest! I hate that damn word!”

+

They get Waverly some proper gear at the first hamlet they come across. It’s not as stately as travelling with a (slightly weatherworn) sorceress, but it’s a bit more discreet. And it cuts the swearing in half.

It also fits her better than the breeches borrowed from Nicole, who has the same legs, but broader hips. Her shoulders are wider, too, and Waverly likes when her lover’s shirts slip off her shoulder, usually, but not when she has to carry a pack with a strap that chafes on bare skin like a cheese grater.

Still, Waverly sadly has to admit that she is definitely not used to day-long marches, unlike the rest of them. They’re mercenaries. They go where the work is. And with Wynonna unable to enter the realm that should be hers by right, that is sometimes further than they would like. You try getting from A to C without crossing B when B just so happens to be an entire country.

“My feet hurt. Dolls, dear Dolls, can’t you – “

“I’m not flying you to the Witch of the Stone. We’re trying to be subtle here, Waverly.”

She pouts. Nicole fairly coos. Wynonna rolls her eyes and wishes for a random band of raiders to come and entertain her. Probably. Waverly doesn’t really care. She’s busy doing lunges to fully enjoy her new range of motion.

This is going to be a long qu – walk.

+

(They stop and buy her breeches, proper boots and a shirt and vest. She puts everything on, bundles her robes into her pack and squats, lunges, twists to test the fit. Then she raises one of her legs straight over her head, proud and perfect and Wynonna watches with a mixture of old pain and incredible fondness in her gaze.

Her little sister might not be a princess in anything but name since she was six years old, but she still remembers how to dance.

Dolls, in a moment of uncharacteristic gentleness, slings and arm around her waist and holds her close.)

+

Three days later they’ve reached high, rocky ground. Across the river, only a few miles away, Wynonna can see the land that was once her family’s. It’s darker than she remembers, more dead patches in the dense foliage of the woods, more grey areas that mark bare rock. She wonders if it’s childhood memories skewing things, or if the land itself is dying.

She wonders if going back is a good idea.

Their lives aren’t bad. Waverly is happy at the Citadel, learning and researching what she loves. She has grand plans for when she’s a full sorceress. Returning to their village, helping people, building a library and teaching everyone to read. She wants to do good for the people who once took in a family of fugitives, wants to be with Nicole.

And Wynonna loves the life of a mercenary. It’s not what she dreamed of when she was a little girl, but the violence, the movement of it suits her. And she has Dolls, has Nicole, too.

Maybe they should just turn back. Maybe it wasn’t Bobo who sent the constructs after all. Maybe he only meant to scare them further away. If they stay where they are, swear to never return, if –

It’s the smell that alerts her, that and the way Dolls is stiffening beside her, his core temperature rising so rapidly she can see the air around him shimmer.

Nicole catches on at the same time, hauls Waverly backwards toward a spot of flat, open ground and draws her sword. Since that’s a good idea, Wynonna copies her even as Dolls flexes his fingers, popping claws.

“What is it?”

“Something nasty,” Wynonna offers her sister at the same time as Dolls says, “Smells like dead things.”

Then four of them burst out of the bushes. They’re human, or at least human-shaped, but filthy, moving jerkily. The one advancing on Wynonna has teeth filed to a point, like a cat’s. They’re not armed, but with the heavy smell of decay wafting off them, well. They don’t really have to be. Dead things have no need for tools.

Waverly is frantically digging through her pouches for something useful while Wynonna and Nicole charge in, swords swinging, leaving Dolls to guard their sorceress.

The women end up back to back, swinging with practiced ease as they creatures advance, moaning and slapping at them with hands and feet. They don’t seem to feel pain and cuts don’t really faze them at all.

“Go for the heads again?” Nicole suggests as she ducks a wild punch and cuts one of them along his thigh. The injury should hobble him, but he just keeps coming. And the smell is going to make Wynonna barf any second now.

“Chop them to pieces!” Waverly yells from the back, followed by, “Eeep, oh my god, you stink, Dolls, do something!”

Wynonna risks a look, finds her sister, both hands full of powder, dancing away from one of the creatures while Dolls clings to its back, shredding its chest.

Their gazes meet. “’Nona, chop!”

Wynonna chops. A hand goes flying. It doesn’t stop twitching after it lands. Nicole gets a leg, then a head and a torso split in two. They keep chopping until all the pieces are too small to move anymore and then dance away from wildly grabbing hands. All the while, the moaning continues.

“I’m going to have nightmares about this.”

Nicole jostles her with an elbow as they lean on their weapons, catching their breath. “Get in line, sister,” she drawls, then straightens as Waverly steps forward, chanting, and pours the stuff from her hands onto the body parts. Dolls adds some more parts to the pile, then gets back. Wynonna squints. “Is that… salt?”

“Purifies,” her sister offers, between chants, keeps going until, with a faint crack and fizzle, the pile stops moving. Sluggish blood oozes out of an empty eye-socket. Wynonna gags.

Into the ensuing silence, Nicole drolly offers, “Well, I guess your uncle wants you dead real bad, huh?”

While Waverly starts fussing over her, Wynonna turns to stare over the river again. Home. Homestead. That word used to mean safety.

“We don’t really have a choice, do we?” she asks.

Next to her, Dolls shakes his head, eyes still golden yellow. “No. I don’t think so.”

+

That night, they camp on the next peak, far away from the pile ‘o’ bodies, even closer to the river. To the border. Wynonna doesn’t even try for sleep, just volunteers for first watch right away, grabs her blanket and turns her back on the circle of firelight.

She’s looking the wrong way, away from the path, but no-one calls her on it. Not yet. She’ll turn around when they settle down.

But Nicole and Waves are still murmuring in low voices and Dolls joins her where she’s perched on a boulder, staring across the river. He leans into her enough for her to feel his crazy body heat, to lean into him, just a little.

“I can feel it, you know?” she says, eventually.

“The border?” His arm creeps around her shoulders and he never says much, but he always knows just how to touch her.

“The whole land. It’s calling me,” she admits, feels like an idiot even as she does. “Has been for months. I think the magic of it, of the curse, actually wants me there. Wants me to go home. And the banishment wants me to stay away. It feels like… like those black stones, we found in the market after the thing with the werewolves?”

“Magnets?” he offers, a chuckle in his voice. They both know that half the time, she only pretends not to pay attention.

“Yeah. That. It’s drawing me in and pushing me away at the same time and it gets worse the closer I get and I kind of want to barf.”

“Please don’t.”

“Hey,” she defends. “At least this time you’re wearing shoes!”

“An hour,” he repeats, not for the first time. “It took me an hour to get all the sick out from between my toes.”

“Well, you shouldn’t have stood so close to a person under a spell gone wrong.”

“Next time, I’ll just drop you at the closest healing ward and leave you there,” he promises. Solemnly. Hand on heart and everything.

“Liar.”

With a laugh, he presses a kiss into her hair, turns her chin and gives her another, proper one, proving once more why she’s with him even when they drive each other up the wall sometimes. “You know it.”

+

Later, she turns to face the other way and finds her sister curled up with Nicole, their bedrolls piled around them, holding each other close against the earl autumn night. They look sweet in their sleep and Wynonna wonders if she and Dolls ever look like that.

Wonders if she made a mistake in letting her little sister, her only blood family, her baby girl, come with them. Oh, she knows it wasn’t really her choice, Waverly would absolutely have found a way to follow them, but still. It’s her job to keep her sister safe, to protect her heart as well as her body.

And this… she doesn’t see this ending well.

For any of them.

Best case scenario: Wynonna ends up with a throne she doesn’t want or deserve after killing a man she once called uncle.

Worst case scenario: everyone she loves dies.

Yeah. Not really looking forward to either of them.

Still, the only way is forward. She learned that very young.

+

Nicole’s knowledge of the riverlands is invaluable, insofar as it helps keep them a lot drier than they’d be without her to tell them where they can cross semi-safely and where their camp won’t be flooded by spring rains overnight.

Both Earp sisters have similar opinions of water: it’s for drinking and washing and otherwise, they might as well be cats.

The redhead leads them steadily higher along the banks of the river, sometimes closer, sometimes farther away, until they hit the riverhead after almost two weeks of walking.

There actually is howling.

Unlike most rivers, this one doesn’t come out of the earth a trickle, but as a fully formed stream, rushing and wailing over the rocks. They’re wet from the spray before they get within twenty spans of the water and Wynonna shivers in the shadow cast by the enormous rock looming above them. The Ghost River explodes out of its base like an angry snake from a basket in the southern markets.

“This isn’t a source,” Dolls observes, ever clinical. “It’s a fully formed underwater river coming up.”

“Fantastic,” Nicole snarks. “Makes me feel a lot better about the ghostly howling.”

Their resident reptile shrugs. “Caves. The water probably runs through a whole system of them. They’re known to create the weirdest sound effects.”

“Says the cave dweller.”

He rolls his eyes. “Exactly.”

“Guys!” Waverly interjects, dropping her pack at her feet and sitting down on a stray rock. “Can we focus? The witch if supposed to be up there. How do we get to her without alerting her?”

For a long moment, all four of them stare up the sheer rock face. It’s so smooth and utterly without handholds that Wynonna suspects magic at work. Either an illusion, or actual carving. To test her theory, she steps up to the rock and presses her hand against it, eyes closed to block out her sight and just feel.

“Nope,” she offers after a beat, “not an illusion.”

“I could have told you that, sis.”

“Didn’t. So how _do_ we get up?”

“We could try to round the base? There has to be some kind of access, right? Witches can’t fly.”

“No, but we levitate. Guys, this witch is centuries old. She’s a lot more powerful than anything I’ve ever seen. I have no idea what she can do.”

“So we have to take her by surprise.”

“For all I know, she could already know we’re here.”

“Full frontal assault, then?” Dolls muses.

“We’d need to get up there first. And she’ll definitely have wards. There are spells that will break down any ward, but the stronger hers are, the longer it will take me. In that time, we’re fish in a barrel.”

Nicole gives a slow blink in her lover’s direction. “It turns me on when you talk war,” she announces after a long moment.

Waverly blushes scarlet. Wynonna mimes gagging on her finger. Then she claps her baby sister on the shoulder and tells her, “Flirt later. First: evil witch to break our banishment.”

With a sigh, Waverly gets back to her feet. “Split?”

Dolls and Nicole go one way, the sisters the other, hands trailing along the strangely smooth surface of the rock in order to see through any illusions. They walk until the rushing over the river stops losing its droning, overwhelming quality, about a quarter of the way around rock. The giant structure just lies there, in the middle of fairly flat land, like a giant flung it there and left it.

“This whole place is weird, right?”

“Witch of the Stone, living atop the Ghost River source,” Wynonna points out drily, raising her voice to be heard. “What’s weird about that?”

Waverly goes to answer, but suddenly stops, mouth open. She goes back a few spans, then forward again, testing something.

“The noise is getting louder again,” she says and Wynonna realizes that yeah, she just had to almost shout to be heard. Again. They’re half an hour’s walk away from the water by now.

“Caves,” she echoes Dolls’ earlier explanation. “Probably more than one way up.”

Suddenly, both sisters have the same damn idea. Their gazes lock, they open their mouths and blurt, at exactly the same time, “The way up is through!”

+

By the time Dolls and Nicole reach them from the far side, they’ve found a well disguised and spelled opening in the rock with scuff marks in the stone, like someone’s been walking over it for centuries.

Since there’s no point in waiting and Wynonna is feeling cranky and wants to pick a fight, they decide to just head up and see. “Might as well, right?”

They might be a little dead inside when it comes to risk assessment and threat-of-death situations. Well. Most of them. Waverly abruptly stops fiddling with her magic ingredients and drops to her ass next to her pack.

Her breathing is a little fast. “Oh my god, that is a centuries old witch up there, how do you expect me to fight her?”

Wynonna kneels next to her panicking sister. “Well, there’s four of us, Waves, so just do what you can and be safe. It’ll be okay. You’re a great sorceress!”

“I’m an apprentice!” her sister wails and it would be comical at any other time, but now it’s just… not good.

“You’re better at magic than anyone else?” Wynonna sucks at comfort. If it doesn’t come in a flagon or tankard, she’s bad at it.

“But you and Nicole are warrior queens and Dolls is a _dragon_!”

Suddenly, Nicole is there, on Waverly’s other side, hand on her shoulder. “List the spells you know, top off your head,” she orders, her voice calm. Soothing. Nics grew up with a boatload of siblings and an irate father. She knows how to calm people down. Wynonna gratefully leans back on her calves and watches.

Waverly sniffs, shakes her head. They’ve all been expecting this, in a way. Everyone freaks on their first not-quest. The danger, the violence, the discomforts. It all sinks in. Wynonna threw up all over Curtis, goddess rest his soul, and Dolls once mentioned sitting, staring at a wall for two days. The only one who might not have gotten overwhelmed by it is Nicole, because Nicole is the most well-adjusted, self-reliant person Wynonna has ever met, mercenary or not.

“List them,” she says again, rubbing Waverly’s knee.

“Levitation, cutting charm, stirring charm, boiling charm,” she lists, reluctantly.

“You can fling a person out a window, slice them up, bang them into walls and boil their blood with that,” her girlfriend points out, perfectly calm.

Waverly stops, blinks. “I can?”

“Sure? You’re creative and you know a load of magic. If Wyn can kill a guy with a fork, you can fight an evil sorceress with a cutting charm meant for potion making, right?”

“I can,” Waverly repeats, surer. See? This is why Wynonna can’t complain about her sister being with one of her best friends. Nicole is far better for her than anyone else Wynonna could find for her.

And because Nics is obviously a genius, she adds her own two coins. “A light spell can blind someone. Also, you can levitate weapons. And don’t forget what Gus taught you with a knife. You’re awesome, baby girl. You’re going to kick ass.”

Waverly blinks again, slowly. Curled up as she is, she looks all of six years old again.

Then, for the third time, voice finally firm, she repeats. “I can. I will.”

Crisis averted. Now, for the magical stone lair.

+

Waverly prepares the spells she needs to tackle any wards, pre-casts a few defensive spells on herself in case of a close-range fight and then lets herself be herded into the middle of the column, Dolls first, Wynonna second, Nicole last. The last thing she does is conjure a little mage light with a flick of her wrist. Now that she’s decided she’s kickass, she’s become almost eager to go up there and fight. Wynonna exchanges looks with Nicole, knows the other woman is going to make sure Waves stays safe.

Good.

The entrance opens into a tunnel, which turns into stairs fairly quickly. The noise from the river is a dozen times worse in the confined space until, suddenly, between one step and the next, it cuts out completely.

“Ward,” Waverly whispers. “Cancels the noise.”

“Alarm?”

She closes her eyes briefly, feels for the magic. “No, I don’t think so. But go slower. If I feel any other wards come up, I can warn you. Actually,” she wedges herself past her sister, taking second place in the line. “There. Better.”

The stairway splits in half a few minutes later, one path curving sideways, one down. Further on in both, more intersections are visible by Waverly’s mage light before the darkness blankets them.

“Anyone else have a bad feeling about this?” Dolls asks no-one in particular.

“You mean the low, sinking feeling of doom?” Wynonna answers, grinning widely. “Nah. I say down.”

Since no-one has a better idea, they head down. And up. And left. And right. Getting out of here is going to be a bitch once they’re done. But then, Wynonna thinks, looking at Dolls’ dark shoulders ahead, they have a secret exits strategy.

Every few turns, they have to stop and wait for Waverly to poke holes into the wards spread through the entire rock like a fishing net. Or maybe a spider web. But nothing attacks them and nothing shrieks an alarm, so they patiently wait and quietly marvel at how much easier this is with a sorceress at hand. (Even an apprentice one.) Usually, they’d be knee deep in henchmen and curses by now.

After a while, rooms start splitting off. At first they’re only alcoves, then they get deeper, wider, higher. A few have doors. All of them are locked. They crack every single lock, inspect every single room, moving like they would in any other hostile dwelling. Securing the place, bit by bit. They find the occasional ward on the doors, too, which Waverly disables with a lot of chanting and smelly herbs. Some of them are alarms set for water damage, some for vermin, some for intruders. One judges by intent, several others are simple trip wires.

There is no way to tell if their Waves catches them all, but their luck _seems_ to be holding.

Until the room with the bars, they don’t see another living creature.

+

It’s wide, low-ceilinged and it smells like a slaughterhouse. When Waverly directs her mage light into the deep, dark room, they’re met with a low, angry noise and a scuttling sound, like something trying to escape from the light.

Dolls immediately pops his claws, the girls go for their weapons. Waverly shoves more power into her light and the room flares to life.

Most of it is separated by a wall of bars, solid metal, roughly worked. There is food, spoiled and rotting by the heavily locked door.

This is a prison cell.

“Holy goddess,” Wynonna breathes as she lets her eyes trail further toward the back of the cell and finds a bundle of rags in the shape of a man.

It – he – moves, twitches, squints into their light and finally uncurls enough to study them from dark eyes. His hair is long, his beard scraggly and from the smell alone, Waverly thinks he must have been in here for _years_.

“Decades, actually,” the man offers, his voice so low and raspy that, at first, Waverly thinks she imagined the answer. Also, she was thinking aloud again, wasn’t she?

But then she looks at him again and his eyes are right on her and suddenly (men in cages should not be able to move this fast) he slams against the bars in front of her, arms reaching. Nicole hauls her back even as Wynonna draws her sword and Dolls lets out a snarl that reverberates off the close walls like the inside of a drum.

The prisoner pauses, arms dropping to stare at Dolls, eyes wide and impressed. “Fucking reptile,” he finally judges and then turns back to Waverly. “Tell me, little witch, what possessed you and your fine companions,” he – is he _leering_ at Wynonna?! - “to come to this accursed place? Jewels? Gold? Love?”

“Survival,” Wynonna interjects, both her words and her body, between the bars and her sister. Waverly, half leaning into Nicole still, feels a little glad and strangely bereft. “We need her to lift a banishment so I can kill a guy about a throne.”

“She’ll kill you,” the man’s voice has smoothed out fast and well. He clutches the bars now, looking intent.

“We’ve come this far and we’re not that easy to kill.”

“You do look good with that sword.”

And now, he’s apparently flirting. From the inside of a dungeon cell in an evil sorceress’ fortress of stone. “And you appear to have a nice, strong grip on it. How does it handle?”

“I’ve officially seen it all now,” Nicole mutters right into Waverly’s ear.

Just then Wynonna actually blushes. Brightly enough to be visible in the bad lighting.

“Okay, now I’ve really seen it all,” the redhead corrects.

Dolls throws them a look. They beam at him.

“If you’ve come this far, lass, it’s because good Constance has let you. Hasn’t your mother taught you the fable of the spider and the fly?”

Wynonna rolls her eyes. “Well, like you said. This fly has a sword. And a pretty solid grip on it, too. Good for beheading. I need to kill the guy sending random attackers after me and my sister. And I can’t do that while I can’t set foot inside the ho…realm. So I need the Witch of the Stone to lift the banishment. See my problem?”

Behind his beard, the man hums. “Which realm? Which throne?”

“Why does it matter?”

For the second time, the man throws an arm out beyond the bars, but this time, he doesn’t try to grab. He just holds it there, palm toward Wynonna, eyes partially closed. “Because, lass, I can feel my magic thrumming in your veins and I’d like dearly to know why.”

“WHAT?!”

“It wouldn’t happen to be that kingdom yonder by the river, would it? And that throne, meant to seat an Earp’s noble ass?”

Waverly blinks. Then she tilts her head and wills her light to brighten, so she can properly see, the eyes, the cheeks, the chin under the wild beard – “You’re Doc Holliday!”

The – Doc Holliday draws back from the bars to bow, mockingly, proudly, like he isn’t wearing rags that smell of – oh god, he said decades. “But he disappeared over a century ago! Have you been here all this time?!”

The man’s head jerks up, eyes wide, surprised. “A century?” it’s a mumble, quiet. Sad.

Wynonna, being the sensitive creature she is, ignores his gut-wrenched expression completely. “You mean, Doc Holliday? The Sorcerer who helped Wyatt claim the throne over two hundred years ago? The one that put the twenty-seven-year curse on our entire freaking family? That Doc Holliday?” She rounds on him. “Is that the magic you were talking about? Take it the fuck off!”

“Curse? It’s a gift. A precaution. Not a curse.”

“It has a mad usurper trying to kill me and my baby sister!”

Doc Holliday shakes his head. “It’s in your blood. You’re born with it. The only way to remove the magic is to remove the blood.”

“Death,” Nicole neatly summarizes. Dolls slips forward silently, placing himself way, way inside Wynonna’s reach. Close enough to comfort, although Waverly isn’t sure who need it more. The two of them aren’t as demonstrative as her and Nicole, but Waverly knows Dolls would die for her sister with a smile on his face and blood on his teeth.

The man rattles the bars again. “Get me out of here and I’ll help you in whatever way I can. Say what you will about the _curse_ , but I’m loyal to the Earp line and always have been. If you’re Earps, you have nothing to fear from me.”

Wynonna looks at Dolls, who scowls, fiercely and growls again, just for good measure. Then at Nicole, who shrugs (she didn’t grow up on tales of Doc Holliday and probably has only half a clue of what is going on) and finally, at Waverly. Who turns to stare at the matted, filthy mess that claims to be a centuries old sorcerer and probably actually is. She saw pictures of him as a child, in the library she and Uncle Bobo used to hide in when the king was in a foul mood.

He looked splendid and powerful then. Now…but then she doesn’t look much like a princess either, in her peasant drab. And Wynonna, fierce and bloody and scarred, certainly looks like no queen.

“It’s the right thing to do,” she finally says.

And it is.

+

Doc (“No need for formalities, eh?”) leads them toward the Witch of the Stone with sure, precise steps. No more detours.

He doesn’t walk like a man who’s been imprisoned for any amount of time, though, and Wynonna needs only to look at Dolls to know they’re both wondering if this is a trap. But then, the man is centuries old. Who knows what magic is keeping him upright.

He blows through the wards the stumped Waverly for hours with a negligent wave of a hand, shredding them like wet tissue. Power or permission? Power or permission?

If this is a trap, well. Claws and fangs and swords kill sorcerers just as well as anything else. And Waverly really does wield a mean cutting charm.

They nod to each other, quietly, wordlessly, and decide that if they have to, they’ll kill the man in front of them.

“So, how are we going to subdue her?” Waverly finally asks, voice hushed, as the tunnel starts leading upwards in a pretty straight line. It feels like the air is getting better, too. Which means they’re almost there, probably.

“Subdue?” Doc drawls, slowing down to look back. “You want the banishment broken, do you not?”

Wynonna grimaces. “Want is a strong word.”

She’d rather not bother with all of this, to be honest.

Doc trails his eyes over her. “Yes, it is,” he agrees, completely innuendo laden.

Dolls steps up close, snarls. Doc grins and winks at him. “Constance is a wicked, corrupted, spiteful old hag. There is no way on the goddess’ green earth she’ll do it just because you ask nicely.”

“But the only one who can break enchantments this strong is the caster!” Waves argues.

“Or the caster’s death,” Doc counters, calmly. “Kill the witch, break her spells.”

Something very, very eager crosses his face at that. “In fact, let me start,” he announces, turns around and disappears around a sharp corner. By the time they’ve caught up with him, he’s standing in the doorway of a wide, open room with carved windows facing the waterfall. Since it’s neither deafeningly loud nor very wet in here, Wynonna guesses magic. It’s always freaking magic.

At the far end of the room, a polished looking woman with blonde hair and a nasty smile stands, hip-shot, like she’s posing for a painting.

“My, my, look what the vermin dragged-“ she never finishes her sentence, because Doc hauls back with one hand, mutters something quietly and throws a rapidly growing ball of glowing blue magic at her _out of fucking nowhere_.

The witch slams backwards into the rock wall and something audibly breaks.

“How the hells did you do that!?” Waverly squeaks like a startled mouse.

Wynonna digs her elbow into her sister’s ribs. “Fight,” she reminds her, because she can see the scholarly rabbit hole the other woman is about to fall into.

Dolls is so impressed he actually has an expression. Eyebrows and all.

Unfortunately, the Stone Witch seems less impressed, because she actually _gets back up._ She dusts off her black silk dress, flips her hair out of her face and with an angry sneer on her face, launches her own magical attack.

Everyone scatters and Wynonna and Dolls go wide, running at her from either side while Nicole stays to guard the magic wielders, Waverly starts digging through her pouches for the prepared spells from earlier and Doc just slings pure magic around like wood-and-steel weapons.

“That’s so not part of the plan,” Wynonna snaps as she uses the Witch’s evasive maneuver to take a low swing and catches only skirt for her trouble. Dolls closes in on the other side, claws swinging, and gets flung back by a wall of magic. Stone shatters. Dust flies. For a moment, he lies very still.

Wynonna decides to forgo worry and get really fucking angry instead, waits for another attack from Doc and then goes in again, driving the witch into a corner, ducking spells, swinging, stabbing and occasionally kicking. Once or twice, a spell gets too close for comfort, but she can feel her sister’s magic crawling over her skin, warm and soft and ferociously protective, and Doc is still bandying around pure magic, using it to intercept the Witch’s attacks when he can.

Which… is actually pretty nice, but not really, considering he started this fight. There was a plan!

Wynonna gets in another hit, blood drips from the other woman’s arm, Waverly shouts something, there is a flash and a bang and when Wynonna can see again, the Witch of the Stone is on the floor again, this time right by Dolls, who finally, _finally_ moves again, just in time to grab her by the ankle.

Wynonna blinks away the last spots from the overpowered light charm to see the Witch kicking at him and him holding on tighter.

And hold on, still, while Doc winds up for a truly epic, magic enforced punch and lets it fly.

In the aftermath, Dolls lets go of the body to roll to his feet unsteadily and brush rock dust from his shoulders. He’s bleeding sluggishly from an already healing cut above his left ear and from the way he keeps shaking his head, something is off.

Waves and Nicole are fine and coming closer.

Wynonna herself has only bumps and bruises.

Doc kneels by the corpse, hands folded and quietly tells her headless body, “May you spend eternity in darkness, Constance Clootie, with your screams unheard and your prayers unanswered. May your powers be in the earth and not in your hands and may your blood wither and your line die. May your name be ashes and your deeds dust.” He pauses in his strangely official sounding curse, then adds, “Rot in hell, you bitch.”

Then he stands, brushes off the rags he’s wearing and turns to them. “Now then, the sword.”

“What sword? Did that seem weirdly anticlimactic to anyone else?”

Waverly snorts. “Did you see my light spell?!”

“Well, we’re on a quest and this was only the halfway point, at best. Those fights tend to be easy,” Nicole offers. “Narrative structure and all.”

“Yes,” Dolls tells Waverly. “Still do.” He blinks for emphasis, rubs at his eyes.

“Not a quest!” Wynonna roars, for the hundredth time. She goes ignored again.

“It was awesome,” Nicole agrees, hugging Waves sideways, completely ignoring the other Earp’s outburst.

“Why, child,” Doc tells Wynonna, grinning crookedly through his beard, ignoring the byplay, “your great-grandfather’s sword.”

+

“Peacemaker?!”

Wynonna is screeching.

She’d deny it if Waverly said it out loud, but she’s screeching. The Earps are not, as far as Waverly can tell, descended from Banshees, but her sister is making a fair attempt at imitating one. She’s been shrilling that one word for five solid minutes now, dead witch forgotten in the corner.

“You have Peacemaker? Wyatt Earp’s legendary sword? The magical one? The one that can kill anything? _Peacemaker_?”

Doc is making a face. Dolls is leaning back and watching him squirm while flinching every time Wynonna reaches a new pitch. Nicole is looting the room. Waverly is studying a set of runes carved along the window sill. They seem to be rapidly aging, crumbling under her fingers.

Not a good sign.

“Peace-“

“Would you calm down!” Doc finally cuts over Wynonna.

She freezes immediately, eyes narrowing. “I beg your pardon?”

Dolls smirks and moves smoothly until he’s standing at his lover’s back, a threatening, looming promise. But instead of reacting like normal people do, their new partner (traveling companion? ally?) watches the dragon move almost eagerly, head cocked to one side.

Then, abruptly, he turns to the Earp Heir. “I had it. Dear Constance has been taking care of it this past century, while I was in the bowels of this goddess forsaken rock, howling at the walls.”

Waverly has a sudden, terrible idea of why the Ghost River might be called the Ghost River.

“It should be here somewhere.”

“Bastard sword, rubies in the hilt, inscription along the blade and runes on the cross guard?” Nicole asks from where she’s kneeling in front of an ornate chest, staring.

Waverly fights the urge to tell her lover to mind the wards. Nicole might be a magic null, but she’s not stupid. She knows how to approach spelled items. Still. Waverly doesn’t like it when Nicole takes risks.

She turns back to the runes. They’re barely more than scratches in the hard rock surface now. She can faintly hear the river, now, the howl and thunder of it.

Everyone else turns to look at Nicole. Doc raises an eyebrow. “As it happens, yes. Why?”

In lieu of an answer, the redhead bends forward and pulls that exact sword out of the chest, swinging it in an upward arc, using the momentum to propel herself to her feet and spin, holding it out to Wynonna.

“My Liege,” she says, and there is a smile on her face and for the first time in this entire mess, Waverly realizes this is it. Her hand drops away from the runes, answer suddenly clear – and unimportant.

The Witch of the Stone is dead. All her enchantments are broken.

She turns to gape, wide-eyed, at her sister, holding a family heirloom lost for a century with the sort of reverence she usually reserves for Waverly only.

“’Nona,” she says, quietly. “’Nona, we can go _home_.”

And Wynonna smiles, wide and shakily, and swings Peacemaker like she was born for it. “Then let’s go.”

+

It’s… easier said than done.

First, _all the Witch’s enchantments are broken_ , which means the rock has lost much of its… everything. The passages are collapsing by the minute, materials are degrading, wards are failing, there is water and damp everywhere and the noise from the river is deafening.

The dissolution started the moment the Witch of the Stone died and it took Waverly too long to understand it. Doc, she thinks, knew all along, but just didn’t care. Now, the whole place is shaking around them. She’s clutching her sister’s arm for balance, trying to keep Nicole close and stay on her feet at the same time.

Doc takes a long look around and then dives for another chest in another corner and digs out a few things, twisting them into a hasty bundle before straightening. “I suppose you’ll need me to stabilize an exit for us?”

He looks a bit smug about it. Dolls, predictably, just snorts. A whiff of smoke escapes his nostrils. “Not really,” he denies, before pointing toward a carved stairway in the back. It leads upstairs. The sides of it are crumbling as a long, tiny line of runes rapidly degrades into dust.

Under their feet, something bangs, breaks and shifts with enough force to make the ground buck.

They jog, single file, to find themselves on the flat top of the rock. The ground is vibrating softly even up here, either with the collapsing tunnels or the force of the water, but Dolls sends Doc a shit-eating grin before his neck cracks, once, ominously.

He gets them all down safely in time to watch the rock collapse into itself in a great plume of dust and debris. The roar of the river stops for a moment, then two, then three.

Then it bursts out of a new opening in the rubble with the same force as before, smashing its way free and continuing on as it always has.

+

Wynonna has a problem.

The problem is about the size and shape of her paramour, but paler, louder and altogether mouthier.

Doc Holliday after a wash, a shave, and in some sorcerer’s robes he stole from the Witch (or she stole from him), looks altogether too good. The robes are the open kind preferred for battle magics, with tight breeches and a snug fitting shirt underneath and there is definitely magic at play here, because instead of being a pile of bones, as anyone should be after a century of incarceration, Doc looks like a well-trained, healthy male in his thirties.

That chest –

“Ouch!”

“You’re drooling,” Dolls comments, retrieving his elbow from the depths of her ribcage.

“He’s hot,” she admits, unashamed. She hears the long gone voice of one of her maids scoldingly telling her that a lady doesn’t say such things, especially not to her husband, but then Wynonna a) hasn’t been a lady for a long time, if she ever was, b) isn’t actually married to the dragon sitting next to her and c) spends her days swinging a sword and hunting evil and doesn’t really care.

She wonders, idly, if there is still any of the old court left, under Bobo’s rule, and what they will say about her. Waverly will be fine, she’s charming and clever and an apprentice, too, but Wynonna knows what she is.

To distract herself, she leans into Dolls and drawls, “Don’t think I haven’t noticed the aggressive displays of one-up-man-ship that have been happening practically since the moment we got him out of that cage.”

Completely straight-faced, he shrugs. “I have no idea what you mean.”

She’s about to retort with something clever and witty when Doc finishes smoothing out his clothes and turns toward the four of them. “Well then, may I accompany you fine folks on the rest of your quest?”

“It’s not a fucking quest!”

+

Peacemaker fits Wynonna.

It shouldn’t, it’s too big for her relatively lithe frame, and obviously built for someone with massive reach, but when it’s in her hand, it feels light as a feather. She felt it the moment Nicole passed it to her, but she doesn’t full realize it until they get ambushed at the border.

Homestead is pulling at her like a fishing line hooked behind her belly, and with the banishment no longer countering it, it feels like an ache in her entire body, wanting her closer, closer, closer. She hurries them toward the closest crossing and in her need maybe misses a few warning signs until they’re in the middle of the river and the arrows start flying.

Dolls immediately pushes himself in front of the girls while Doc starts chanting instantly, a ward springing up in a ten span diameter around him. It covers Nicole and Waverly, who, with only a little delay, is casting her own ward, leaving Dolls and Wynonna out in front, unprotected.

Dolls is just going to shake off any arrows, but Wynonna – can apparently smack arrows out of mid-flight with her new bastard sword. She can’t even remember drawing Peacemaker, but there it is, in her hand, dancing in perfect circles, a ward of steel as secure as the one of magic fizzing and spitting behind her with every impact.

As she dances, she makes out five different archers, unwisely gathered in two clusters.

“Dolls!”

“Yes,” he shouts back, already moving parallel to her. They run. It’s hard with the water up to their knees, but it’s enough to make the arrows stutter. Archers never really know what to do when their long range targets turn the fight into close range combat.

At the bank of the river, Dolls crouches low, suddenly, hands folded and extended and Wynonna takes a running leap into them and lets him fire her straight up, toward where two of the archers are sitting low in a willow tree. Behind and to the left, she can hear him get back to his feet and tackle the other three.

A minute later, the fighting is over and Wynonna drops back onto solid ground, ignores the wet squelch of her boots and slaps into Dolls’ chest with a low chuckle, arms coming up to hug him around the neck and pull him down for a long, dirty kiss.

(They met like this, her nineteen summers old and so angry with the world, him still in the uniform of a lord he didn’t serve anymore, battle scars and bleeding eyes and they got drunk in the same tavern. And when she picked a fight with the wrong people he was there, playing the knight to her lady, and when she left and they ambushed her, he was there, too, and they fought just like this, instinctively falling into each other, back to back, moving perfectly in sync and in almost a decade, the only thing Wynonna has found that comes close is a weapon magically _bound to her bloodline_.

What choice did she have, except to keep him?)

“Goddess bless,” a voice comments and it’s not Waverly, who usually says things like that, or Nicole, who generally just ignores whatever is going on on the far side of the camp fire. It’s Doc, voice pitched low, sounding… Wynonna can’t parse what he sounds like.

She lets go of Dolls, brushes an arrow tip from where it got stuck in his jerkin, and steps back.

Under her feet, Homestead sings its ancient song.

“We’re home,” she blurts, suddenly surprised.

Waverly beams bright enough to rival the sun.

+

**Part Two**

+

“’Nona? Can I talk to you?”

Waverly looks at her with big, worried eyes and Wynonna immediately pops up from the log she found and motions her sister ahead of her. They can walk the perimeter of the camp and talk unheard. Because this is an ‘unheard’ kind of face Waves is wearing.

“What’s up, baby girl?”

Waves chews her lip, which is never a good sign. Then she hesitantly offers, “It’s about Doc.”

“So old and yet so hot. Totally weird, right?”

That earns her a laugh, but the worried look doesn’t go away. Wynonna sighs, hitches her arm under her sister’s and pulls her into a walking hug. “Talk, Waves. What is it?”

“You know how magic works? Where we draw it from?”

“What does that-“

“Humor me.”

“Inside of you. Everyone has it. Magic, life force, soul. Doesn’t matter what you call it, everyone has it. The ones who have enough can use it to cast active magic.” It’s a recitation of an old, old lesson, but one she has never quite forgotten. There is another way, another source but… Waverly’s kind of magic, the good kind, the right kind, draws on the user’s own energy. That’s all that matters. Waverly’s magic, the magic of the Citadel, is good. Wynonna knows that. She checked, very thoroughly, before she let her sister set foot there.

Waves nods. “Exactly. It’s like an ocean, inside of you. And every time you cast magic, you use a drop of that ocean. If it’s a truly powerful spell, two, maybe even three drops.”

“Which is why you can’t run out of magic,” Wynonna points out. You just get too exhausted to access it anymore.”

She’s seen a case or two of magical fatigue, usually in battle, and never with a pretty ending. And once, only once, she saw someone with a small core, all used up. Burnt out. Saw what comes after. Saw –

(Her own core, the magic inside of her, is a bit like that. It’s there, but too small to be useful. Not without doing the kind of thing she doesn’t do.)

Beside her, Waverly stops abruptly. “But you can run out. That’s what I’m worried about. What Doc did, to fight the Witch? That used a lot of magic, Wynonna. A lot. It’s the first thing any apprentice learns, no matter what school or faith. You never, ever, cast raw magic, because it’s too much.”

Wynonna frowns. “How much are we talking?”

Waverly shakes her head.

“Cups? Buckets? What?”

“Lakes, Wynonna. Lakes of magic. Every single attack he cast cost more magic than anyone would expend in a lifetime. I know he’s somehow immortal, but that kind of thing? It will kill him.”

Wynonna takes a few moments to assimilate that knowledge. “Does he know?”

“Absolutely.”

“Is it his own magic?”

“Yes.” She breathes a bit easier. Above their heads, a crow alights on a tree branch, cawing. Homestead, so far, has been crawling with them.

“Then why is he doing it?”

She shakes her head again, looking as young as her age, for once. “I think… I think he might just not care.”

Well, Wynonna thinks, wryly, she knew the super-powered, immortal sorcerer on their side was too good to be true. But instead of saying that, she steps forward to hug her sister close.

“I’ll talk to him,” she promises.

Waverly likes Doc. Which means Doc doesn’t get to commit suicide by magical burn-out. End of story.

+

That evening, after everyone else has gone to sleep (or is at least doing a decent job at pretending), Wynonna and Doc are the only ones left upright, keeping watch.

No-one is quite comfortable yet letting the newcomer be the only watch. Trust takes time and they’ve all been burnt before.

They sit amicably next to each other and Doc has just finished regaling Wynonna with some harebrained story about him, Wyatt and a feral lamia that she doesn’t believe for a second.

Still, it’s an opening. Not the one she wants, but one nonetheless. “You said it’s not a curse. Why?”

He doesn’t startle at her abrupt change in subject, just turns those lazy, lidded eyes on her. After a long moment, he hums in consideration. “I suppose,” he starts, “that from your perspective, it might be. But that is not how I intended it.”

“Well, what did you intend?”

He hums again, hitches the blanket Nicole donated to his cause higher around his shoulders. It gets cold here, at night, closer than only a few miles across the river, and the ground is half-dead, trees gone. Wynonna thinks she remembers a forest here, but there’s little more than rotting trees and washed out soil now. (She thinks of burnt-out magic and other ways to get power.) “Do you know the tale of how Wyatt won the throne?”

“Sure. Everyone does. He deposed the old king, because he was a bitter old tyrant.” Wynonna knows enough not to believe every word of it, but she figures the gist must be true.

Doc nods, in any case. “He was an old man, and he had ruled for longer than either of us had been alive at that point. He was lazy, stuck in his ways, and utterly convinced that he was the goddess’ avatar on this earth. Wyatt was afraid that complacency would make him, or his progeny, the same. He wanted a safeguard against such corruption. So I gave him one.”

“So it’s not that the heir has to rule once they turn twenty-seven, it’s really that the old ruler can’t rule anymore, once their heir is twenty-seven. You put a fixed timeframe on ruling.”

“There are ways around it,” Doc admits. “Not having children would do the trick. But the spell sees such things. The longer an Earp rules past the day they should have passed on the throne, the more bad luck will befall them, until, eventually, they die.”

She snorts. Loudly. Dolls cracks an eye open. “And you say it’s not a curse. Really?”

He snorts, too, more quietly. Amused. “Yes, well. At the time, I was doing a good deed for a friend.”

“Who, apparently, had a very low opinion of himself,” she feels the need to point out.

He shakes his head. “Your history has glorified him, I think. Wyatt was a man. Just a man. Deeply flawed and truly magnificent and still just a man. He knew his faults and he knew that pride would be his downfall. I was his friend, so I did what I could, to guard him from that.”

It’s strange, to talk to a man for whom history is an anecdote, something he remembers. “Is that why you’re helping us now? Because of who our ancestor is?”

“You have been wronged,” he points out, unnecessarily. “I aim to help you fix that.”

“Like you did with the Witch?”

He sends her a mild glare. “Her name was Constance Clootie. Do not make her into a thing greater than she was. She very, very small, in the end.”

There’s the opening she wanted. “And yet you used pretty big magic to kill her.”

His smirk at that is dark and satisfied. She sort of likes it. Still. “My sister thinks you’re going to kill yourself like that.”

A laugh escapes him at that and it is… exceedingly bitter. “Believe me, my lady, I am quite hardier than that. Your sister need not fear for me.”

With that, he shakes off his blanket, taps a hand to his heart in quiet farewell and disappears into the dark to check their perimeter.

“That,” Wynonna muses to herself, “did not go as planned.”

Across the fire, eyes closed again, Dolls chuckles into his bedroll.

+

She can feel it clearer now, with her feet on Homestead soil, with the banishment gone, no longer pulling the other way.

The spell. Curse. It’s calling her, that tug behind her belly, and now, with nothing fighting it anymore, she sometimes imagines she can even see it, a piece of thread laid out before her, from the center of her being, all the way to the throne stood at the center of the kingdom.

She thinks Doc can see it, too, or sense it at least, because once or twice, when he walks ahead of her, she notices him do a weird sort of hobble-skip, right over where the thread shimmers just barely outside of perception.

It’s weird. It’s really weird.

She asks Waverly about it once, because they have the same blood, Earp blood, and the curse slumbers in her veins, too, but her little sister just shakes her head. “I feel… better, now that we’re across the border. Like… homecoming? But I’m not sure… if it’s the curse, it’s really just a little of it. I can’t…. You’re the heir, Wynonna. Not me.”

Willa is the heir. Willa. Not Wynonna. But they don’t speak their sister’s name if they can help it.

So Wynonna follows the tug inside her belly, lets it lead her forward and hopes it’s not the rope leading the sheep to slaughter.

(And even if it is, well, this sheep has a magical freaking sword to introduce the butcher to. So there.)

+

They’re two days inside the border before they get attacked again. More of the strange living dead that don’t quit. Literally more. This time there are over a dozen of them. They don’t look like they were fighters in life.

One of them is a middle-aged woman who tries to bite Wynonna until she chops her head off. There’s males, females, some dressed in rags, some in finery. Doc, standing shoulder to shoulder with her, flings spells attached to knives and some of Waverly’s clay beads, with ease until he suddenly freezes.

“Fish?” he asks, voice rough. “Goddess, Fish!”

He’s staring, wide-eyed, at a diminutive man in a modest costume. A merchant, maybe, or a trader of some other kind. Not poor. Not rich. His face, under the dirt and decomposition, looks kind. Guileless. He must have been buried in a very arid climate to be this well preserved.

Wynonna is suddenly, violently reminded that these… sacks of meat used to be people. That they were at rest, before Bobo did this to them. It makes hacking at them easier and harder at the same time.

Doc throws a tripping jinx at the one he called Fish and he lands hard, takes down two others like pins in a game. It gives them a brief respite, which Doc uses to turn toward Waverly, hunched on her knees behind Doc and Nicole.

“Purifying ritual?” he hollers.

In lieu of a direct answer, she shouts back, “Salt and blessing!”

Wynonna doesn’t quite catch his expression as she ducks under a wild swipe, hacks off an arm and stomps on the still chomping head at her feet. His tone of voice is massively unhappy, though. “If only I had had time to gather some ingredients from dear Constance’s lair. The things I could do.”

“Whine, whine, whine,” Wynonna snarks back, blood up and pumping, a she narrowly avoids being pinched between two dead things. “You could help me right now!”

One gets in a lucky hit and she lands on her rump, kicks sideways and tries to get on her knees. They swarm her, their jerky movements plenty to keep her down once she’s fallen. She screams in anger, kicks and uses the pommel of Peacemaker to try and make a dent. She can’t even swing the sword properly at this close range.

Then, suddenly, two of them go flying, grabbed by a red whip of lightning, pulled backwards and away. She uses the opening to roll, stand and swing, catches Doc winking at her, the two trapped dead men at his feel, still struggling to escape his spell. She makes a rude hand sign and lops off another head.

“Well, princess! What are you waiting for?!” He shakes the rope he must have grabbed from their packs free of the whip-like spell and uses it to bind the corpses’ feet, to immobilize them for now. He is, Wynonna thinks, trying to avoid using raw magic. Anytime she’s caught him using spells, they were attached to objects now.

Good.

Waverly sounds distressed. “I don’t have enough salt! I have to wait until they’re all chopped and piled up!”

Doc kicks away another attacker while Wynonna is making headway on the chopping, Peacemaker singing in her hand. “Then dissolve it in water, levitate it and make it _rain_!”

He rattles it off so easily that there is an actual, brief lull in the fighting as everyone with a brain left stares at him. Then Waverly goes, “Oh, oh, yes, I see,” and three arms, two legs and a torso later, Wynonna feels a drop hit her cheek. It runs down her face and she licks it up. Salty.

Doc and Waves start chanting at the same time and a moment later, the dead start screaming and writhing and smoking wherever the saltwater hits them. A moment after that, they all drop, dead again for the last and final time.

Nicole doesn’t waste any time, just spins on her heel, declares, “That was hot,” and proceeds to stick her tongue in Wynonna’s baby sister’s mouth. Yuck.

Waverly gives in for about five seconds, then bats her away. “Did you see that? That was brilliant! Thank you, Doc!”

He nods, giving her a pleased grin. “Magic is more than books, princess. Use what you have in creative ways and none shall be able to best you.” He tags on another wink for emphasis. Nicole scowls, but without intent. And when she says ‘intent’, she means ‘a weapon’.

Wynonna finishes wiping the blood off of Peacemaker and straightens, surveying the damage with Dolls, who has already started kicking the body parts together. They’ll burn them and move on.

“If he has this many revenants at hand, why doesn’t Bobo just send them all at once? Overwhelm us.” he asks, idly, piling up legs.

Before Wynonna can speculate, Doc counters, “Perhaps overwhelming us is not the goal, then?”

“What do you mean?” Nicole sheathes her own sword and grabs a torso.

“I mean,” Doc answers promptly, standing in the middle of the carnage, not making a move to help, “that, as far as I understand your tale, your usurper king had more than a decade to send any kind of assassin after you. Instead he did nothing until you were both fully grown and well able to defend yourself. And even now, he sends only irritants, rather than real dangers your way.”

“Aunt Gus and Uncle Curtis did a good job of protecting us,” Waverly defends immediately.

“Perhaps so, but they could hardly have hidden you from the kind of magic able to raise the dead. And if they did, well, they have been dead some years, yes?”

It was a cold winter, just a stupid, random, cold winter that did them in, in the end. They both got sick and suddenly, the only people Wynonna had relied on for more than half her life, had been dead. They’d deserved better.

She shakes her head. “So what? You think Bobo doesn’t want us dead? Then what?”

“A trap,” Dolls offers, sounding thoughtful. “Doc, if I’m not mistaken, thinks we’re being herded.” He kicks at a legs. “And these are the sheep dogs.”

Wynonna opens her mouth. Closes it. Sheep. Goddess dammit.

“At least that means it’s officially not a quest,” she finally mutters, petulantly and more than a little scared, but refusing to admit it.

+

“But does it change anything if Bobo is trying to bait us into a trap?” Waverly asks reasonably once they’ve put a safe distance between themselves and the stench of burning, rotting flesh. Those damn crows were already circling when they turned their backs.

Doc hums thoughtfully, then shakes his head. “We go in eyes open. We try not to be predictable. Not much else we can do.”

“We could always go home?” Wynonna suggests. Her heart isn’t in it, though. There is still a song under the soles of her boots, Homestead singing to her of welcome. She’s not sure it’ll ever let her go again.

She’s not sure she wants it to.

“So we keep going,” Nicole summarizes.

+

Rain sucks. Torrential rain while walking on a dirt road sucks even worse. There are only a few scraggly trees on either side of the road to break the wind and twice washed-out mud comes down in an avalanche, burying them knee-deep. They walk for two more miserable hours before finding a tavern at a crossroads and ducking inside, shaking water off their oil skins and trying to wring out sodden hair. Wynonna can feel cold, congealing mud between her toes.

This kind of weather is unseasonable. Unnatural, maybe. Somewhere, deep down in her childhood, lie memories of storms like this, of endless winters and ravaged land. She shoves them right back where they belong and sighs in relief as she gets slapped in the face by the heat from the fire.

All the rooms are booked, but they’re welcome to the fire for a few coin and there is free spicy mead to drive out the cold. The innkeeper eyes them with greed in his eyes, but their weapons make him hesitate and eventually, give in. They settle in, huddling until the warmth of the room permeates their damp clothes, and then relax, slowly.

Wynonna makes a point to keep her head down and her hair loose. It’s been a long time, but Uncle Curtis always said she has her father stamped across her face and the last thing they need is rumors.

Bobo knows they’re coming, no doubt about that, but rumors might start unrest and Wynonna refuses to be held responsible for the deaths that would result. Even if she really doesn’t want to be queen, these are her people. Will be. And that means protecting them from harm in the form of Bobo’s military fist.

Across the room, someone is regaling another table with grand tales of the olden days, making both Dolls and Doc snort derisively at random intervals. Every time it happens, they send each other baleful looks and then start quietly correcting everything the story teller is getting wrong, from modes of dress down to historical events.

Travelling with a couple of centuries old guys is surprisingly entertaining, especially because Wynonna can practically _see_ the unwilling, grudging respect between them grow.

The cincher comes when a new story starts with an ode to the looks of queen Lucada of Attara, most lauded beauty of all the lands.

“Ugly cow,” Doc mutters, derisively, sniffing to make his point.

“Terrible teeth,” Dolls says at almost the same time, because trust a dragon to focus on teeth and then both of them sort of pause as they realize they both knew the same woman and have the same opinion of her and –

“Tried to seduce me into putting a spell of Wyatt for her, she did,” Doc grumbles.

“Tried to bribe me with a chest of coins to help her attack the castle of a lord who turned her down,” Dolls counters, sneering. “Coins are boring.”

Carefully, so as not to startle either of them, Wynonna leans over toward Nicole. “Are they… bonding?” she whispers, laughter in her voice.

Nicole cocks her head to one side, studies them for a moment. “You know what? I think they are.”

She talks loudly enough for the men to hear and they both throw her looks. “What?”

“Nothing?” Wynonna immediately straightens, wipes her face clear of emotion. Waverly nods too hard on Nicole’s other side. Nicole smiles the beatific smile of one who grew up with a lot of siblings to blame things on.

Wynonna turns to watch the group again, notices how haggard most of the people are. They looks like a few hard winters, skinny and badly groomed, their clothes old, repaired too often. Poor. They look poor. They shouldn’t. This is rich farmland, these people should be able to dress and feed themselves.

Wynonna wonders how badly Bobo taxes them, how hard he works them. She’s half tempted to ask them, when, across the room, a little girl in a glum, grey dress asks, “Was she as pretty as Queen Willa?”

Beside her, an older woman makes a sign to ward off evil, spits onto the floor in disgust. The rest of the table makes derisive sounds.

Wynonna doesn’t notice.

+

They sit, taut with tension, lips pressed tight, fists clenched, very, very still until the last happy drunk has disappeared – either into an upstairs room or the chilly night.

They sit and they wait and they vibrate with tension until the door falls shut on the last idiot and then Waverly flings herself at Wynonna, clutches her tight and starts chanting, “She’s alive, she’s alive, oh goddess, she’s alive.”

Over and over and Wynonna holds on too tightly, rubs her sister’s (her younger sister’s, she needs to specify that again, now) hair and back and tries not to imagine seventeen years in the care of the man who murdered their father, his king, in cold blood.

Willa is alive. Willa is King Robert’s wife. Willa is alive and queen and a prisoner in her own childhood home. Willa is alive. Willa is –

“We left her.” She doesn’t mean for Waverly to hear, stares at Dolls and Nicole and even Doc wide-eyed as she breathes the realization, but of course Waves hears. It makes her cry harder

They left her. With Curtis and Gus holding onto their hands, with little more than the clothes on their backs, they ran and they left Willa. Left her with Bobo. Left her –

“How did we not know that she’s alive?” she wonders. She feels a little numb. Like only the weight of her sister is grounding her. Like she might fly away.

She knows the answer. Until a week ago, she couldn’t set foot on this land and didn’t want to, either. She’s made a skill of avoiding any mention of Homestead, be it news, gossip or fairy tale.

She couldn’t have known. She saw… they dragged her, dragged Willa, away from them with hungry hands, torches flickering, the clang of swords everywhere, blood on the flagstones, they dragged her and she screamed and then she _stopped_ and Curtis hauled Wynonna over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes and they _ran_.

Waverly leans back, sniffs. Her eyes are glassy. “We have to get her back,” she says, and her voice is stronger than it has any right to be. “We have to.”

+

Before they heard of Queen Willa, they… didn’t exactly treat this like a fun outing, but neither were they hurrying along. They camped early for private couple time, for hunting and talking, for Doc to teach Waverly a few tricks and the others to spar.

There is none of that now. They march. Dawn to dusk, walking lunches, they walk, silent and grim and both princesses can see the looks the others exchange, but ask them if they care. Around them, the land grows paler, colder, deader, sucked dry in more than one way, and it matches their mood perfectly. They hurry on.

Their sister is alive and they’re not going to leave her in Bobo’s hands a second longer than they have to. Not after _seventeen years_.

Guilt, Wynonna finds, is a bit like stale well water, in the way is coats your mouth, a little slimy, a little off, and refuses to be washed down, no matter what you do.

So they march. And they plot.

There was a passage, secret, hidden, that once saved their lives. Now it’s going to save Willa’s. Finally. At last. They’re going to save her and be a family again, be together. Willa will be the Earp on the throne and Wynonna will guard her back, will keep her safe and happy. Waverly will finish her apprenticeship at the Citadel and become Willa’s sorceress.

They will be safe. They will be happy. They will be together.

Through the passage, up into the castle, storm the throne room and take Bobo by surprise. Find Willa. Keep her safe. Keep her happy.

It becomes a mantra.

It tastes better than the guilt.

+

“You know, my Lady,” Doc drawls as he catches up to her, his legs easily eating up the distance even at her punishing pace, “you asked me a question once, not too long ago.”

Wynonna grunts as she tries to gauge the distance to that forest over there. Still at least an hour’s walk away. Dusk is… around that far. They can make it, if they hurry. She can already see the crows above the trees, specks in the sky, and they creep her out, but they’re fucking everywhere, so she deals. They’re like a bad omen.

“Wynonna.”

The shock of Doc Holliday calling her by her given name is actually enough to make her stop for a moment. Then she catches herself and resumes walking, snapping a brisk, “What?”

“You asked me, not too long ago, if I was aiming to kill myself. For revenge. For vengeance.”

He walks beside her with his robes tucked behind his hands, resting on his belt, long legs moving quickly, his eyes blue and his beard scruffy and she lets it distract her for a moment, how unfairly beautiful he is for an ancient thing, then turns away.

She wonders if Willa was ever allowed to be attracted to anyone. If she ever got to fall in love. If –

“What about it?”

“I think,” he tells her, thoughtful, quiet. The others aren’t that far behind, “that perhaps it is time for me to repay the favor.”

“What?” she asks, again, then shakes her head. “I’m not suicidal, Doc, and this isn’t about vengeance. Willa isn’t dead. She’s alive and she needs saving.”

“You’re being reckless.”

“I’m being determined. What did you say, back then? Oh, right. Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine.”

Doc finally has enough, grabbing for her arm. She yanks sideways and away, stops, braces for a fight. He backtracks, hands in the air. “I’m sorry. But, Wynonna, think. The heir spell is active in you. You can feel it, I can, too. It’s active and calling you and it should not do that if there were a fit Earp of the proper age on the throne.”

“Willa is alive. You heard them. She’s alive, and she’s Queen.”

He sags, seemingly giving up in the face of her anger. “I know. I heard them. But perhaps… perhaps she is not Willa anymore. All I am asking,” he goes on, like he didn’t just knock the bottom out of her gut, “is that you think before you act and get everyone, including both of your sisters, killed. Use your brain, my Lady, not just your heart.”

With that he drops his arms and steps back to join Waverly and Nicole, easy. Relaxed. Like nothing happens. Dolls closes in on Wynonna. Throws an arm around her shoulders and points at a little copse of trees a bit off the path, an outlier of the forest further ahead.

“Camp?” he asks.

She has no doubt he heard everything. Stupid dragon. Wynonna thinks of the worried expression on her baby sister’s face when she thought Doc, almost a stranger then, was being reckless. Looks at her now, dark circles under her eyes, damp and dirty and exhausted.

She has two sisters. And one of them is already here. She closes her eyes, inhales once, then exhales. Slowly.

“Camp,” she decides, leans into Dolls’ eternal furnace-like warmth. “We need to talk strategy anyway,” she tags on. There’s only five of them. Storming the place is probably not the way to go.

+

In the end, the voices of sanity (Nicole and Doc) prevail and they set up in a little inn just inside the capital’s walls. It’s a tiny, ramshackle thing, with the wind blowing through the wooden walls, but it looks like every other place they find, so they take it. The city doesn’t look any better than the countryside. The only difference is the amount of starving children loitering in the streets. Homestead is dying and so are its people.

(“Magical drain,” Doc murmurs as they make their way upstairs. “Someone is draining the land of its power.” Waverly gasps. Wynonna firmly keeps her gaze on her feet and refuses to acknowledge his words at all.)

The sisters huddle together in the room while the other three go scouting. For Nicole that means making friendly with the innkeeper’s daughter for gossip, for the men it means a few covert trips to the castle, disguised as workers of some sort.

Castles, Wynonna remembers, are always busy as a beehive. No one person really knows everyone, or everything that’s going on. Two men in dirty clothes looking like they belong won’t be noticed at all.

Still, sitting around and doing nothing is nerve-wrecking.

Wynonna is having a staring contest with a crow sitting on the windowsill, head cocked to one side, when the door finally opens and Nicole comes tumbling in. If she doesn’t have anything new, Wynonna might kick her in the shin.

The redhead first strips off the cap that hides her distinctive hair and then unties the strings of the skirt she got from goddess knows where to hide her combat gear. She drops both on a chair, kisses Waverly hello pointedly slowly and then sits down to very calmly declare, “I think the reason no-one knew anything about Willa is that there’s a geas on the whole country.”

“What?” The crow caws loudly and tipples sideways on the sill.

“I overheard a lot of people talking about the King and Queen, the rising taxes, the bad winter and how they didn’t keep the food stores big enough. They’re unhappy with Willa and Bobo, keep comparing her to your father, and they talk openly about all of it, but the moment they notice me, they stop and do something else like they can’t even remember they were talking.”

“That might just be wariness toward outsiders,” Waverly points out, ever logical.

“And how do they know I’m an outsider?” Nicole asks. “I look like everyone else here, I was dressed the same, I speak the same language. But one look at me, and they shut up. Geas, I’m telling you.”

“I would explain why we never knew any of this,” Wynonna mutters, mostly to herself. The crow caws again, amused. She bats a hand at it until it takes wing, leaving her alone. Annoying beast. They’re like rats with wings. Or were those pidgeons?

“Okay. So. Geas. How does that help us?”

“It doesn’t. It mostly hinders us. But it’s still active, which means the Witch of the Stone wasn’t the one who cast it.”

That gives all of them a moment’s pause. “So you think….”

“There’s another magic user in the game. A powerful one.”

Fantastic. Just what they need. More magic. And somehow, Wynonna can’t help but think that whoever cast the geas? Is probably also the one draining the land. Just, you know, a hunch.

+

When the men get back, Nicole repeats her findings and Doc immediately starts frowning.

“Am I wrong?” she asks. He shakes his head.

“No. Quite right, I’d say. Now, if only we knew what, exactly the geas disguises, it might help us find the one who profits from it.”

“Bobo,” Wynonna instantly says. “Has to be, right? He’s draining the land, he’s probably powerful enough.”

But Waverly bites her lips and Doc shakes his head. “No. Anyone can drain magic from the land, if they feel like putting an eternal stain on their soul and power. But a geas is a spell of truth, of reality. You cannot cast it with borrowed power. Blood magic.”

Wynonna throws her head back against her chair, winces. Magical theory gives her a headache. “That keeps coming up, lately.”

Dolls puts a hand between her head and the chair to stop her from banging her head again. He hums inquiringly.

“Blood magic. The constructs Bobo sent, the curse in my veins, and now this. Why is it always blood?”

“Because it’s powerful,” Waves offers, shrugging. “So it’s not Bobo casting the geas. Who is it?”

“Who would profit from keeping your sister’s survival a secret?” Dolls asks. “Bobo would actually profit if everyone knew, wouldn’t he? It’d legitimize his claim on the throne.”

He’s right. Damn him.

“What’d you find out at the castle?”

“That two centuries old intel is not helpful,” Dolls announces, sending a smirk at Doc.

“And that fire does not solve everything,” Doc gamely fires back. It looks almost like… they’re teasing each other? When did that happen? Wynonna sends Dolls a glare. He’s not supposed to flirt with the sorcerer when she’s not there to see.

Dolls rolls his eyes. “Everyone hates the King and Queen. They keep raising taxes while the land under everyone’s feet is dying. Crop yields are going down, wood is becoming a precious resource, there are tales of stillborn children and spoiled wells. And they blame it all on Bobo and Willa, even inside the castle.”

“These fine folks would revolt on the spot,” Doc agrees. “However, we have also ascertained that the King tends to take supper alone in the Grand Hall, while his wife prefers her quarters.”

Which means Wynonna’s plan of ‘storm the throne room, kill Bobo’ is actually a valid option. She decides to be cheery about that. Goddess knows there isn’t anything else to be cheerful about.

She needs a damn drink.

+

They have two rooms with two beds and Dolls and Doc pour her into one of them after she has sufficiently medicated herself with ale, mead and that clear stuff that burned her eyes out a little bit.

Then they climb in on either side of her because the girls claimed the other room and that’s just how it goes, sometimes. Wynonna naps until her eyes stop burning, then opens them and rolls into her lover. Who does not have pale skin and a beard. Whoops.

She rolls the other way, ignoring the chuckle behind her. “Dolls,” she whispers on a hiss. It makes her ears ring, so maybe it’s a loud whisper. She doesn’t care. She’s drunk.

“Wynonna,” he returns, dryly, and digs his arm under her waist to keep her close and make the bed stop rolling. He’s warm and his eyes are kind and she loves him, so she tells him.

He loves her, too. It’s nice.

“I want you to protect Waves,” she tells him, with a very strict face.

“I always protect Waverly.”

“But in the castle. When we go to kill the evil wizard. King. Whatever. I want you to get her out when it all goes badly.”

“It won’t go badly. We have a plan.” He doesn’t say that it’s her plan and her plans always consist of ‘see bad, kill bad’ and never really work. That’s why she loves him.

“It will,” she counters, grimly. “That fucking place makes everything inside it go bad, eventually,” she explains, thinking of all the things Gus and Curtis kept out of the bedtime stories they told Waverly, of all the things Wynonna was never really sure they knew she knew. Of the land dying and the way their father sometimes had this look in his eyes. Of his tower and the long, long nights he spent there. Of the stuff they never talked about because there was no need. Everyone else involved was dead and even Uncle Curtis and Aunt Gus were never really involved.

Aunt Gus was a low-ranking noble, one of the Queen’s ladies-in-waiting only because they were childhood friends. Curtis was a first generation knight. They weren’t important enough to know.

“Know what?” That’s Doc, rolling closer behind her. His breath smells of the tobacco he always smokes and the alcohol he matched her in, cup by cup.

Did she say all that out loud?

“Yes, you did.”

Whoops. “Promise me you’ll keep her safe and get her out.”

Dolls does this thing where his jaw goes all tight and his lips purse and he hates when she calls it pouting, because he only does it when he really, really hates things, but it _looks_ like a pout.

“Xavier,” she says, low and careful and serious. “Please.” Wynonna never says please.

He nods. Once. Curtly. “I will. But in exchange, Doc will stay with you. Deal.”

It’s not really a question, but she grimaces and frowns and then nods. It makes sense. Dolls can fly out Waves (and Nics, because where one goes the other follows) but Doc can’t fly, so he’ll have to stay with her. She’ll keep him safe.

There is a strangled-cat sound behind her, but no-one says anything else, so Wynonna gropes in the dark until she finds a hand and pulls it around her, too and falls asleep between her dragon and her sorcerer and hopes she didn’t say that out loud, too.

Whoops.

+

Stepping foot into the castle again is like traveling back in time. Waverly was six and wrapped up in Gus’ cloak and arms besides, but Wynonna remembers.

The tunnel mouth where they hid from false dawn to true dark, silent and hungry, shocked and exhausted, waiting for a safe chance to get out of the city.

The tunnel proper where they discarded everything that marked them as nobles, leaving jewels and silks in a pile in the dirt. She thinks she recognizes the spot, kicks at the dust collected there, sends a single pearl skidding between Nicole’s boots. The rest is gone.

The dark, seldom used hallway where loyalists bled and died, covering the princesses’ escape with their bodies and their swords. Their blood looked shimmery, like black silk, in the bad lighting.

Blood again.

The backdoor to the kitchens, through which the insurgents came, the mercenaries Bobo hired with their black-painted faces and their vicious weapons. They slaughtered the entire castle in under an hour.

The stairway where Uncle Curtis slung her over his shoulder when she wouldn’t come.

And there, another corridor branching off to the family wing, where greedy hands yanked Willa backwards by her hair, her nightgown, and never let her go. Not for seventeen years.

“Focus on the present,” Doc murmurs. “Don’t let the ghosts reign here, my Lady.”

“They have been reigning here for seventeen years,” she answers. She feels as if she’ll find Waverly’s favorite doll, the one she dropped when they ran, just around the next corner, if only she looks. Her name was Annabelle and she’d been Wynonna’s first. Her face shattered as she fell and Wynonna remembers it the same way she remembers the rest of the night, split-second glimpses of stark, perfect memories, and an unforgiving terror in her bones.

Still.

Always.

She draws her sword, draws Peacemaker, and takes a deep breath. She’s Wynonna of House Earp and she is not a defenseless child anymore. She is a mercenary, a warrior, a woman. And she’ll never be weak again.

She exhales. “The Great Hall should be this way. I want Nicole on Waverly at the back, and you two flank. Take down anything that might move. Bobo is mine.”

She doesn’t wait for commentary, just strides down the hall, through the ghosts and into battle mode.

The giant oak doors leading into the Great Hall (Throne room, actually, in all but name. Some ancestor thought that sounded too pompous though. Go figure.) briefly give her pause. They used to depict the story of how Wyatt won the throne. There are new doors now, covered in decorative vines and knots instead of a story and the wood looks aged and worn already. New and seventeen years old.

The castle is dead asleep around them and the two sole guards at the doors fall to a lovely dream-aid spell from Waverly, unconscious before they hit the ground. Spending time with Doc Holliday has made the apprentice sorceress terrifying with little more than a few household spells in her repertoire. It’s brilliant.

That and insider knowledge of the castle gets them all the way to these doors and the only reason Wynonna isn’t kicking them open is the fact that such things raise alarms.

Instead, she opens them by the handle and slips inside the hall, the others following and fanning out behind her.

The room is almost completely empty, their steps echoing loudly.

There’s a banquet table piled high with roasts, fruit and cakes at the center of the room, decadent and wasteful. At the end of it is a single chair. All of this, meant for one person. And somehow, Wynonna doesn’t think the staff gets the leftovers, the way they did when her mother ran the household.

Ten steps behind the empty chair, the three steps of the dais rise upwards. The throne stands where it has for centuries, a few more scorch marks on the sides and a usurper on top of it.

Bobo looks… wrong. His hair, a shock of grey so light it looks white, is piled atop his head, sides shaved. The heavy crown sitting atop it is crooked. He wears a great fur cloak of mottled browns and greys, a huge, shaggy thing not fit for a king, and underneath fighting leathers much like Wynonna herself.

He sits slouched, one leg thrown over the armrest of the throne, an idle hand playing with his sword as if it were a walking stick.

He looks like the wildling kings from the stories Waverly liked as a child, ferocious and deadly.

He looks nothing like Robert Svane at all. He was always prim and proper, perfectly dressed and groomed. Their father used to call him a peacock, for all the colors ad silks he wore. If not for the familiar, striking face, Wynonna wouldn’t recognize him. What happened to him? He’s a king now, usurper or no. He should be dressed in silk and brocade not – this.

“Bobo,” she greets and the name finally suits him. Wild thing.

Well, so is she.

He smiles and it looks razor sharp. “Sweet thing. You grew up pretty. And that, Waverly, darling, is that you? Let me look at you.”

Waverly makes a low, angrypained noise at the back of her throat and falls into a basic fighting stance. Good girl. She doesn’t answer the taunt.

Bobo sighs, mock disappointed and twists to plant both feet on the ground, his naked blade across his lap. “I’m glad you two are alright. I worried.”

“Where’s Willa.”

Something flicks across his face, fast and ugly. He waves a hand upwards. “In her tower, as always. She makes such a pretty cliché, don’t you think? Princess stolen and locked in a tower? The irony, of course, is that the tower was once actually her rightful heritage. Speaking of. How does it feel to be back here? Bring up memories?”

His smile reminds her of one of the revenants he sent after them, the one with the needle-point teeth. She clutches the grip of Peacemaker tighter, the movement making the light glint off it.

Bobo chuckles. “Oh, you found it. And… ah. Doc Holliday, unless I’m mistaken. The old hag used to brag about you, down in her rock, rotting alive. Nicely done, killing her. Didn’t think you had it in you.”

Doc flings another one of his pure magic balls out of nowhere and Wynonna charges down one side of the table with only one goal in mind: kill Bobo. If only to make him. Stop. Talking.

He leaps from the throne, brings up the sword as he twists to evade the magic and then jumps high over her first strike. She leaps the stairs, putting them on equal ground, cuts at his midsection in a move that should gut him like a fish.

He parries, spins, cackles like a madman.

“Oh, did old Curtis teach you that?” he taunts. “Nice trick.”

“Shut up!”

Dolls can’t fly in his human form, doesn’t have wings unless he takes the time for a partial shift. Strangely enough, though, he glides very well. He takes a single leap at the table and it shouldn’t even get him to the middle of it, but he sails all the way over it, landing just where Bobo is about to step, forcing him to correct and roll backwards to avoid being skewered on dragon claws. He gives ground, lands hard, rolls and barely manages to get on his knees to block the next strike in time. Wynonna ducks around the throne, aims for his back and catches him in a shallow slice that has him jerking forward and right into Dolls’ claws.

The world stops. Bobo stops. Stares at Dolls’ slit pupils, then turns his head to look at Waverly. His sword drops and Dolls steps back.

The usurper king stumbles sideways landing on the throne he stole, blood bubbling from his midsection, pooling in the corners of his mouth. He turns to Wynonna and grins. His teeth are red.

“Finally,” he gasps. Coughs. “You know, I thought you’d never get here. I was running out of cannon fodder to send after you.”

Wynonna isn’t dumb enough to lower her sword, but she does take a step closer, if only to keep between Bobo and the others closing in. The entire fight was so short, Waves and Nicole didn’t even get to move from the door.

Too short. Just like with the witch. What did Nicole say? Narrative structure?

Too easy.

“Didn’t really work out for you, did it?” she drawls. She wanted to hurt this man. To rage and shred him. To make him feel the pain he caused her family, her sisters, her. To avenge them all.

Instead all she got is this, a few attacks and now, apparently, a deathbed chat. It’s wrong. There is no satisfaction in this.

Bobo’s hands move from his wound, splay, red and sticky, in the air. “I got what I wanted. I’m free. Finally.”

He’s acting like they did him a favor, like he wanted them to kill him, like he _let them_ , and it makes her want to –

“Free from what, Uncle Bobo?” Waverly. Her voice sounds damp. Broken and hurt and hard as glass.

He looks at her, but he’s not really seeing her. Not anymore, Wynonna is sure. There’s too much blood pooling on the seat of the throne. “I did it for Willa. But I was too late.” He shakes his head. “You sister is a viper, sweet thing. Don’t let her bite.”

He rolls his eyes sideways, gaze fixing, for a brief moment, on Wynonna’s eyes. “Earp blood,” he says.

His next cough causes a spray of blood. He gags, twitches.

Dies.

Wynonna holds her breath for a beat, two five, but he doesn’t move again. His eyes stay on her, his chest is still. He’s dead.

Just like that.

With a scream of rage, she hauls back and kicks at the throne with all her might, not budging it a hair.

“No,” she roars, “no, no, no, no!! You do not get to do this, you _fucker_! You don’t-!” she trails off into an incoherent scream, just rage and rage and rage and age-old grief.

He took her sister from her and her father, her home, her family, her safety and her innocence. And now he took her revenge. And unlike all the other times he stole from her, this time he smiled.

And she wants to hurt him. Wants to punch him and kick him and scream at him and force him to _see_ , to understand what it does to a twelve-year-old girl to have everything she knows and is ripped away from her and be left –

This.

A mercenary. A killer for hire with blood under her nails and nightmares in her head, a beast for a lover and an exile for a best friend and nothing to call her own but a magical sword and a broken home.

It’s his fault, all of it, it always has been and now he’s gone and died, refusing to even acknowledge any of it.

No. Just fucking no.

She stops abruptly, chest heaving, sword vibrating in her hand. Or maybe that’s her muscles, straining to kill something. She stops, aware of the others only peripherally. Later she’ll feel guilty for robbing Waverly of her own right to grieve, for endangering them all with her outburst. Later. Now, she stares at the man who used to help sneak her out of her most boring lessons with a grin on his face and a sweet in his pocket, slightly linty and just for her.

There’s blood still trickling slowly from his wound, already congealing on the seat of the throne, soaking the wood there forever. The stain won’t ever wash out but she’s inured to sights like this, barely flinches. Looks at his face instead. Older. Wrinkles at his eyes and mouth. He looks pale and sad and unhappy.

Dead.

His eyes were blue. She can’t remember if she ever knew that. They look a little like her own.

She shakes her head.

“Let’s go,” she tells the others, spins on her heel, bloody sword in hand, to lead the way to the only place they have left to go now – the tallest tower. The place Wynonna swore to never set foot in again as long as she lived. Willa.

“’Nona,” Waverly tries, but Wynonna shakes her head. No.

“Not now.”

+

Waverly is scared.

There’s no shame in admitting it. She just found out that the sister she thought dead for most of her life is alive, watched a man she once adored killed by a friend, watched him die full of glee and spite and relief and now her other sister, her rock, her protector, her _Wynonna_ is stalking the halls of a place that is no longer home, a shuttered look in her eyes and a blooded weapon in her hands. She moves like she knows exactly where she’s going and all they can do is try to keep up.

It seems like an excellent time to be scared.

While they half jog to keep up with their fearless leader, she reaches back, finds Nicole’s hand already waiting, squeezes.

“I have a bad feeling about this,” she mutters. Her lover throws her a deadpan look.

Doc, walking close by, raises a very skeptical eyebrow. “Was it the murder or the deathbed confession that tipped you off, princess?” he asks, even as he keeps prepping spells with nimble fingers, weaving the kind of magic Waverly would have to live a century to unravel and understand.

Both. Neither. It’s been there since they found out that Willa is alive, that feeling, and it feels like lead in the pit of her stomach.

Until now, she put it down to childish jealousies, to the way it was always Willa and Wynonna, before, the older two, closer in age. To how Willa sometimes scared her, or was mean, or poked fun at her. Waverly loved her oldest sister and, goddess, did she mourn her. But she thinks, now, with the distance of a lifetime, that she didn’t like her very much. She thought it was that dislike coming back to the surface, the dread of a little girl afraid she’ll loose her ‘Nona. But now, Bobo’s words echo in her head and she can’t help but think that maybe…

Maybe it wasn’t just childishness after all.

Maybe…

_Your sister is a viper, sweet thing. Don’t let her bite._

She snaps out her free hand, sudden and quick, grabs Doc’s sleeve and pulls him close. “I know she wants you to look after me. But I need to know she’s safe,” she hisses at him, gaze fixed on her – one of her sisters.

She narrows her eyes at him before he can protest. “And I know you need that, too.”

He opens his mouth, some glib joke undoubtedly already on his lips, then pauses. Nods. And twists his hand around in hers, pressing two fingers to her wrist, sending a pulse of pure magic into her skin, warm and close. Protection. She can feel it.

She glares at him for using pure magic again, for draining oceans just for her, but he gives a crooked grin and speeds up his steps to draw even with Dolls and then they reach an endless, spiraling staircase Waverly has no memory of, and there is no more time for talk.

+

Waverly has few memories of her mother beyond warm hugs and lullabies. Everything she knows about the woman who gave birth to her and then died only two winters later, is filtered through other people. Aunt Gus and Wynonna, mostly.

Aunt Gus always had stories about Mom, about when they were girls at court, the shenanigans they got into behind their minders’ backs. They were lovely stories and with the distance of adulthood Waverly knows that they were meant as pacifiers for a grieving little girl.

Wynonna has always only given Waverly cold, hard truths about their mother. She wasn’t around much, left them with Gus and nannies all the times. A queen has duties. She was kind but easily distracted and she hated their father and her arranged marriage. She never really recovered from all the babes-that-never-were between Wynonna and Waverly.

And when Waverly was ten and trying to find her mother in her features, Wynonna gave her exactly what she asked for. “She was tall and skinny, just like me. Like you’re going to be, you weed. Her hair was lighter than mine and her eyes were darker. Like yours, really. You look like her the most.”

The last, Waverly realizes, over a decade later, was a lie. The room at the top of the tower seems impossibly large, bigger than the tower is from the outside. The ceiling is high, running up to a point from which a heavy, ornate chandelier dangles. Along the circular walls, tables and bookshelves are piled high with magical ingredients, herbs, animal parts, jars full of liquids that eternally bubble like they’re boiling.

At the center of the room, there is a chair, heavy, gilded wood, almost a throne, bright and shining against the backdrop of a badly lit room with dark stone walls. Despite the size of the whole thing, it feels oppressive. Like the walls are closing in.

On it, Willa sits, feet folded at the ankle, hands in her lap, perfectly demure, except for the glint in her eyes and the crows perched on either side of her. Her hair is the shade of honeywine and her eyes are dark as pits.

She looks like their mother.

Dressed in forest green velvet and a heavy brocade overcoat without sleeves, she looks like a queen. A queen in a lonely, cold throne room, far from the bustle and life of the castle. Or what should be the bustle and life of the castle. The place is far too still and dead, even for the middle of the night.

She has obviously been waiting for them (the crows, the crows, they were everywhere and they never even noticed, stupid, stupid, stupid), because she doesn’t do anything but smile when Wynonna crashes into the room like a storm, sword raised, hollering, “Willa!”

“Wynonna. Oh, look, you brought guests.” Her voice sounds incredibly fake, like too sweet mead, sticky and cloying.

Wynonna doesn’t seem to hear the note of falseness, even as Dolls and Doc fan out on either side of her, tense and ready to fight. Nicole feels like a bow, taut and ready, as she gently extracts her hand from Waverly’s to grip her weapon with both hands.

A viper, Waverly thinks, and knows that Bobo wasn’t lying.

+

“Willa!”

Her sister smiles, serene and calm and she looks just like Mama. Goddess, of course Willa would grow up to look like her.

“Wynonna. Oh, look, you brought guests.” It sounds… strange. Wynonna has tried not to imagine this reunion, but this… this isn’t what she thought it would be.

“Have you come to save me then?” Willa asks, studying Peacemaker in Wynonna’s hand before Wynonna can make heads or tails of the strange way her sister is behaving. She cocks her head, curious, poised. Like a doll. She never used to be like this, did she?

It seems idiotic, suddenly, the concept of Willa needing saving. She seems to sure, so calm. Strong. It catches Wynonna wrong-footed, that feeling. Off guard. She feels the ridiculous urge to hide the huge bastard sword behind her back and shake her head, like a child caught being naughty.

As if she’s reading her mind, Willa laughs. It’s not… it’s not a nice sound. It brings back memories. Wynonna ruthlessly stomps them out. It’s just this damned room, reminding her of things better forgotten.

“ _I_ ,” Willa continues, words sharp, seemingly not expecting audience participation, “saved _you_. You didn’t even know it, but I saved you and now here you are, _saving me_?” Her voice is cold. Biting.

There is something very wrong here. (It’s not the room.)

“Saved us?” Waves asks behind Wynonna. Her voice sounds very small. “From what, Willa?”

“Little Waverly,” Willa drawls, really moving for the first time to shift forward in her seat (throne, it’s a throne), leaning as if to study their little sister. “You grew up some, I see. Apparently not enough to figure some things out. Dear sister, our father was a very bad man.” She pauses, bites at her lips almost like a child playing a trick. Delivering a punch line. Only it’s not funny. All of this is a show. A play. The lines are rehearsed. Something is very wrong here. “And I saved you from him.”

Wynonna turns her head away, stares at the jars and bottles, the chests and boxes. This used to be their father’s workroom. Waverly doesn’t know. Wynonna made sure she never set foot in here. But she remembers. Every single wicked thing along those walls and the tiny, impossibly neat runes carved into almost every handspan of the floor. She knows.

“What? I don’t understand. ‘Nona?”

Wynonna shakes her head. “He’s dead,” she defends. “What does it matter?”

She’s far more focused on everything else Willa is saying, on the picture she’s painting, alongside Bobo’s. Her anger is draining away, making way for something far more terrible. She thinks she’ll call it horror. It matches this goddess-damned room.

“What?” Waverly asks again.

Willa smiles. She is enjoying this. Wynonna doesn’t remember their sister to be cruel. (Lie.)

“Why, little sister, he was a sorcerer. Where do you think we get it from? But he was bad at it, so bad, so little power in his heart. He had a small heart you see.”

“Willa-,” Wynonna tries, is waved off.

“So he started pulling power from elsewhere until the land started breaking under the strain.” Just like now. It was never Bobo draining the soil and spoiling the wells.

“So he needed another source. Do you know why so much magic demands a blood price?”

“Because it’s life,” Doc says. To spare Waverly, Wynonna thinks.

“He used his own, for a while, until he started to get sickly. And then, well, there was that heir, with magic in her blood, and nowhere for it to go until her twenty-seventh birthday. So why not tap that.” Willa laughs again. It’s downright ugly this time and Wynonna’s limbs are limp with horror.

“I begged dear Robert to do something. I begged him. I begged all of them to save me from the deals he made, the creatures he promised me to. Dark, ugly things.”

“Demons.” Nicole sounds breathless.

“But I was never the nice princess, or the clever one, or the brave one. Robert wouldn’t raise a finger against his liege. Not until he started looking at Wynonna the way he used to look at me. Then, suddenly, Robert was willing to commit treason.”

Suddenly, Wynonna can move again. “Stop it! This is pointless! He’s dead. It’s over!”

“He’s dead because I killed him! He’s dead because I made it so. I saved you!”

“’Nona? Is she telling the truth?”

“The deals he cut, the bonds he forged,” Doc interrupts, “they still exist, don’t they?” He doesn’t, Wynonna notices, address Willa in any way. No ‘my Lady’. No ‘princess’. Nothing.

Her expression turns into something sharp, unnaturally so. “Of course they do. They were writ in my blood, weren’t they? My blood and all the magic in it. Aren’t you glad you put it there, Doc Holliday? It’s your curse that made me such a morsel.”

“We could have left together,” Wynonna blurts. “We could have just run, left this place. We could have been _together_. Why did you… why didn’t you come for us? Why,” and these words almost refuse to leave her lips, are almost too hard to say out loud after so many years of hate, but, “why didn’t Bobo?”

A snort. “You? Wyn, little sister. You couldn’t stand up to him even then. I remember the fear in your eyes when he brought you up here. I didn’t need you sniveling around. And her?” she points at Waverly. “She’s not even an Earp. You were safe and out of the way and I took what was mine. I earned it, Wynonna. My blood has paid for this entire realm, for this throne, for this castle. It’s mine. Why would I share it?”

Wynonna isn’t even going to _think_ about what Willa just said about Waverly.

“You shared with Bobo.”

“Someone had to do the legwork.”

“You used him,” Waverly gasps. Apparently, she’s not thinking about it either. “He didn’t… he wasn’t the bad guy.”

(He was relieved, when he died. Relieved to finally be free of Willa, of the trap he wove himself when he tried to save a girl that was already beyond saving. Goddess. Willa. Poor Willa.)

“He was pathetic.”

That, apparently, is too much for Waves to stomach. She loved Bobo once and then she had to hate him for years and it wasn’t even _his plan_. He was trying to protect them. She screams, incoherent, loud, and very, very angry, and flings some kind of spell at Willa, contained in a fistful of beads that fly across the room like arrows.

Willa bats them away like so many flies and pulls a gold coin out of thin air, blowing on it, directing her breath toward Waverly as she does. Instantly, Waverly screams again, this time in surprised pain, something bright running across the skin with a shimmer, looking almost blue, and the coin starts slowly growing darker.

Wynonna doesn’t really think about it. Her baby sister is in pain and the fact that it’s her big sister causing that pain doesn’t really matter. She attacks.

The coin goes flying, Willa sends her crows to attack with a flick of her wrist and Dolls tries to sneak in from the flank. He gets smacked out of the air by something dark and fast moving, erupting from behind the throne.

Wynonna cleaves one of the fucking birds in two, whacks the second into a wall risks a look. It’s… a tentacle. Sort of. It seems to be made of shadow, of the writhing mass behind Willa’s back, and with every moment, more tentacles form, starting to creep toward Dolls. Whatever that _thing_ is, it has to be at least five times the size of a man.

Another crow appears out of nowhere, then two, four, seven more and Wynonna is caught in a swarm of them, pecking, gouging, scratching, and has to focus for a moment. When she can see Dolls again he’s… well.

Once upon a time, she thought he was a half blood, like most dragon kin that roam the earth in this age. A battle with a harpy, of all things, taught her better. In dragon form, Dolls is all smooth, deep red scales with a dark golden belly, teeth as long as Wynonna’s arm, and a head the size of an oxen. Also, wings.

He flaps them now, spanning most of their party with only one wing, and roars at the tentacle monster trying to wrap around his forelegs. His eyes, a gold so bright it looks like sunlight, meet hers briefly. She nods upwards and he huffs a smoky agreement.

A moment later, he lunges, grabbing two tentacles in his claws, gouging black ichor from them, and beating his wings hard. He shoots upward like an arrow, shredding beams and tile like paper as he hauls the demonic creature Willa summoned out of the tower and into the night air.

Doc is staring. Even at the rock, Dolls only changed partially. But before the sorcerer can make any comment, an errant claw sneaks out and clutches him around the middle, hauling him along. Apparently, Dolls would appreciate some magical assistance while killing this thing.

The trust in Wynonna, implied in taking one of their strongest fighters with him, bolsters her. She risks a glance at Waverly, finds her on the floor, clutching her chest, heaving, Nicole standing guard over her with murder on her face. That strange shimmer is still pulsing over her entire body every few seconds almost like… a shield? But it’s obviously not enough to keep the curse from taking hold.

So far, so bad.

Wynonna turns back to Willa. “Stop it,” she orders.

“Didn’t you hear me? Not an Earp.” Willa argues, like that matters at all.

“She’s my sister.”

“She attacked me.”

Waverly gasps. Wynonna swings for Willa’s head. The spell comes like Doc’s do, a streak of violent light, and Wynonna brings up Peacemaker on instinct, only to watch the spell slam into it, fizzle and – die.

She pauses. So does Willa.

Huh.

The enraged attack that follows sends her tumbling backwards, sideways, just trying to keep moving while slapping spells out of the air like her life depends on it, which it does, and Waverly, Waverly is still gasping, coughing, trying to draw breath.

Willa pauses long enough to yell, “You should have just stayed away!”

And Wynonna comes up on her knees, notices the coin off to one side. It’s half tarnished, the dark stain moving inexorably to cover it completely. She doesn’t need to be told to know what happens when the coin is completely black. Waverly is dying. She’s dying and Willa is the one killing her.

She comes up with a roar of rage, swinging low and as Willa steps backwards, she launches herself forward, using her shoulder and a split second’s imbalance, to heave her older sister off her feet and onto the hard floor with a crack.

Peacemaker finds the throat of its next kill and Wynonna almost does is, almost loses herself in the rhythm of killing, so familiar.

She stops at the last second. “Break the spell.”

“What?”

“The spell on Waverly. Break it.”

Willa laughs again. Wynonna is really starting to hate that sound. “Why? This is your fault. If you’d just stayed away, it would have all been fine. You get to stay alive and safe and I get what I deserve.”

Wynonna lets loose a wordless scream and digs the tip of the blade in, just a little. Just enough to draw blood. “You’re hurting her! You’re hurting _our sister_! You’re hurting the people outside this castle, too!”

Wide swathes of empty dirt, spoiled wells and dead children and maybe all Willa wanted was to be free of their father and his tyranny, maybe all she was, was a victim, but she’s doing it too, now, stealing magic, stealing life.

And Wynonna… Wynonna is not a good person, she knows that, but she can’t let innocents be hurt. And she won’t let Waverly die. “Willa, you have to stop. Please. You have to stop.”

“Never.”

Here’s a secret. Ever since that inn and that little girl, muttering those damning words, Wynonna has wondered why she feels the pull if she isn’t the heir. If Willa is alive, she should feel nothing. If there is an Earp on the throne and their direct descendant is not yet twenty-seven, there should be no pull. Doc said it and she pretended not to listen, but it’s been nagging for weeks.

Homestead sings and the thread spins itself out in front of her, every single step and _it is calling her_.

It shouldn’t. Not as long as there is an Earp on the throne.

Blood. Hers and Willa’s and Ward’s and Wyatt’s. Waverly’s and that of all the people dying out there, starving, poisoned. Blood full of magic and blood full of death, blood for binding and for raising and for spells. Blood for life.

There is no Earp on the throne.

That’s why Wynonna’s blood is singing the song of home.

Whatever their father did to Willa…. Blood is life. And he gave hers away, without consent or permission, he gave it away. The blood that Doc cursed, unintentionally, the blood that is also inside Wynonna, the blood that binds them together.

It’s always blood.

“Break the spell, Willa,” Wynonna says. There is no Earp on the throne and behind her, Waverly is dying. In the corner of her eye, the coin keeps changing color.

Kill the witch, break the spell.

“Never!”

In the end, it’s not even a choice. Waverly is Wynonna’s sister, her baby sister, her treasure, her family, her sunshine. Her first love and the only thing that’s hers.

Willa… Willa died, seventeen years ago, under their father’s spell knife, inside this room, inside this circle of runes, inside this castle. Willa died.

There is no Earp on the throne.

Blood.

Wynonna stabs downward.

The ward springs up a hair’s breadth from Willa’s chest with enough force to catapult Wynonna backwards, onto her ass. She rolls with it, ignores the ache that radiates all the way to her teeth, and ends up on her feet.

Willa is a few spans away, magic swirling between her hands, and her expression is hungry and deranged.

“You’re catching on, little sister,” she mocks and throws her attack.

Wynonna ducks into it, rolls forward, lands a glancing cut and has to flatten herself to the floor the next instant.

She jumps back up, twists sideways, attacks again, ducks, weaves, spins, gets closer and closer and never closer enough.

“Wynonna!” That’s Nicole, desperation plain in her voice but Wynonna has been fighting with her loved ones in danger most of her adult life and Willa, well, she doesn’t think Willa has had to fight at all.

She looks. Just for a second, she pauses to look at the pain she’s wrought and Peacemaker sinks into her unprotected chest like a knife through butter.

“I’m sorry,” Wynonna gasps, as the hilt hits bone, as Willa’s gaze returns to her, full of betrayal and something ugly and twisted. “I’m so sorry. I wanted to save you.”

She twists the sword, because it needs to be fast, because the coin is almost black and Wynonna is not losing her baby sister today.

She twists and Willa gasps and then it’s over.

She runs to Waverly’s side, slams onto her knees hard and grabs her sister’s hand, the one Nicole isn’t clutching desperately, and together, they wait and stare and pray and suddenly, Waverly’s prone forms rears up with the force of her gasp, drawing in air like a woman drowning, and then she’s panting and then she’s crying and then she looks and sees Willa’s body and Nicole understands. Lets her go.

The last two Earps cling to each other the way they did in that tunnel, waiting for darkness, a lifetime ago, terrified, grieving and alive.

It’s over.

Doc touches down a moment later, Dolls shifting as he lands, crouching naked next to them. There is silence.

+

+

**Epilogue**

+

With Willa the geas died and six months later, all kinds of things have come to light. Wynonna didn’t try to stop them. There have been enough lies, she decided, and let the truth spread.

Of what their father was, of the true cause of the blights and droughts twenty years ago and now. Of what Willa did. Of what Bobo did. They’re never quite sure why Willa cast the geas, is it was really just to keep her sisters away, or something else. Their lost sister was, by all accounts, very far from sane.

With the drain gone, the land has started recovering. Last week, they got news that entire swathes of almost dead farmland and forest are slowly recovering. Trade is picking up with their neighboring countries.

Slowly, slowly, Homestead is recovering from the evil that has happened inside this castle for a generation. And it’s doing so with a warrior queen, sword strapped to her hip, sitting on the throne.

And sitting. And sitting.

Her ass is numb.

She blinks, once, twice, slower each time, and then Dolls digs and elbow into her side as discretely as he can, what with her _sitting on a throne_

She jolts awake, smiles at the two women at the foot of the dais. They’re tradeswomen, dealing in wool and silks and before Wynonna zoned out, they were thanking her for allowing them to pick up their trade again after closed borders made it impossible for almost a decade.

She smiles at them and they bow, smiling back, tittering quietly, and leave. As much as Wynonna loves open court day, interacting with the kind of people she thinks of as ‘hers’, even with a crown on her head, sometimes the kowtowing gets a bit much.

And the gratitude. She knows they’re being sincere, but they’re basically thanking her for killing her sister and that… doesn’t sit well.

She watches the women filter out of the room and looks around. Most petitioners have come and gone by now. It’s late afternoon and they should be just about done. The court, as she remembers from her childhood, is still pretty much nonexistent. Willa and Bobo caused most of the nobles to flee. The ones who didn’t are dead. Only a few have come back so far, old men and women who once lived here, or their children or grandchildren, who have never been here.

Now that Waverly’s gone back to the Citadel to finish her apprenticeship, taking Nicole with her, it makes for a pretty empty throne room.

Empty except for Doc. In travelling garb. Striding forward to take the place of a petitioner.

“Doc?” Wynonna asks, frowning. If he wants something, he should have said during breakfast. Or dinner the night before. Or any of the myriad other times she and Dolls have hung out with him, trying to get him to crack.

But ever since their hasty wedding the month before (apparently the people can’t tolerate their queen screwing a dragon unless there’s a ring on her finger, go figure), he’s been politely distant locked down tighter than a virgin priestess’ smallclothes.

“My Queen,” he addresses her, bowing low. Lower than Doc Holliday, immortal sorcerer, should ever bow to anyone, much less a friend. “My King.” Dolls, too. “I have a quest-“

“NO QUESTS!”

“-tion,” he calmly finishes the word. “I have come to request leave of your court, my lord and lady.”

Wynonna frowns. “You want to leave?”

“Your reign is secure, your realm is recovering.” Why does he sound like an old book? “With your sister soon to return with a mastery in her hands, you have no need of a sorcerer anymore. As such, I am not needed.”

He keeps his gaze firmly on Wynonna’s knees, his words clipped and his jaw tight. There is something bitter about his words. Or maybe hurt. And if Wynonna can tell, it’s probably obvious to all and sundry.

Wynonna sighs. Then she scans the hall, finds only a few curious serving girls and the usual guards by the door. She waves them all off. They go.

Then she turns to her _husband_ (yeah, still weird) and drawls, “Babe, I think we’ve been too subtle.”

Dolls, perched with perfect posture on what is traditionally the queen’s throne, sighs. “Or maybe he’s an idiot.”

That seems to dislodge some of Doc’s painful formality, “Now, listen here, you lizard!”

“We might just have to get drastic,” Wynonna interrupts before they can get going.

Doc rounds on her, opening his mouth to undoubtedly ask what she’s talking about in his polite, antique, distant way. Distant. Because he wants to leave. Or rather, Wynonna thinks as she stands and strides down the steps, because he thinks he’s no longer welcome.

A thought which he seems to have only had since the wedding. Which is idiotic, because a ring really changes nothing and also telling enough to make her think he’s not running for the hills out of disgust. Which, in turn, gives her hope.

So she strides down the steps, grabs him by the front of his fancy robes, hauls him in and kisses him. She’s a queen. She can do whatever she wants now and screw subtle. Dolls insisted on subtle and look where it got them.

Doc makes an aborted noise, tries to rear back, thinks better of it and start kissing back. Excellent. Wynonna stops the kiss. “There. That’s better,” she declares.

Behind her, Dolls groans dramatically and Doc spins toward him, looking… afraid? But all Dolls is doing is rubbing his forehead and rolling his eyes.

“What?” Wynonna demands. “He was going to leave. And I made sure we’re alone first!”

He groans again. Louder. “We had a plan.”

“He was _leaving_!”

Finally, the sorcerer catches a clue. “You were… courting me?”

“No,” she snarks, “we always invite people we do not want in our bed to _all of our private meals_. Goddess, you’re denser than Waves. Can we go have sex now?”

Doc makes a lovely choking noise and blushes bright red. She decides she likes the color. Dolls seems to agree, because he gives in and joins them on the ground, slinging an arm around her shoulders and hauling Doc in for a kiss that is at least twice as filthy as the one Wynonna gave him.

“Subtle,” she jeers at him when they come up for air.

He bows cheekily and orders, “Private wing. Bedroom. Now.”

Doc’s blush renews. Wynonna grins wickedly and, grabbing both their hands, starts hauling them toward the doors. Everyone’s going to see and she doesn’t give a damn.

There has been enough misery in this castle to last them all a lifetime. She’s going to snag her happiness where she can get it.

Besides, she’s queen now. She has a crown and dresses and everything. It’s kind of a drag, to be honest, and surprisingly hard work. She deserves perks.

She tells them that as they both try to untangle their hands and at least pretend they’re not running off to have sex.

She pinches their fingers and tugs them harder.

“Not sure I like being a ‘perk’,” Doc observes, voice dry.

“Get used to it, old man,” she informs him. “I got the crown, I make the decisions. Especially since you were about to make a stupid one.”

Leaving them. Really.

“Just give in,” Dolls advises. “She always wins.”

She really does.

+

+

[the end]


End file.
